Caging The Dragon

Caging the Dragon
The Containment of Underground

Nuclear Explosions
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and their contractors; Test and Evaluation, 30 June
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6.AUTHOR(S) PR - R J
TA - R A
James Carothers.et al. WU -TR83582000
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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory REPORT NUMBER
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Livermore, CA 94550
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11. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES
This work was partially sponsored by the Defense Nuclear Agency under RDT&E RMC Code T4662D RJ
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13. ABSTRACT (Maximum 200 words)
The science of the containment of U.S. underground tests is documented through a series of interviews
of leading containment scientists and engineers.
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Containment
16 PRICE CODE
Underground Nuclear Testing
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IV
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 THE ORIGINS OF CONTAINMENT 5
2 THE RAINIER EVENT 31
3 THEMORATORIUM AND THE RETURN TO TESTING 59
4 THE BEGINNINGS OF CONTAINMENT PROGRAMS 87
5 THE NEVADA TEST SITE 1 1 3
6 EARTH MATERIALS AND THEIR PROPERTIES 1 47
7 LOGGING AND LOGGING TOOLS 179
8 ENERGY COUPLING AND PARTITION 207
9 CAVITIES AND HOW THEY GROW 229
10 CAVITY COLLAPSE, CHIMNEYS AND CRATERS 265
11 THE RESIDUAL STRESS CAGE 291
12 HYDROFRACTURES 325
13 BLOCK MOTION 347
14 DEPTHS OF BURIAL, DRILLING 365
15 EMPLACEMENT HOLES, STEMMING, PLUGS, GAS
BLOCKS 391
16 TUNNELS AND LINE-OF-SIGHT PIPES 419
17 PIPE CLOSURE HARDWARE 453
18 PIPE FLOW 465
19 CODES AND CALCULATIONS 495
20 CURRENT PRACTICE 523
21 SOMETIMES THE DRAGON WINS 549
22 ABOUT THE CONTAINMENT EVALUATION PANEL 571
23 THOUGHTS, OPINIONS, CONCERNS 587
Appendix: The People of the Book 613
Index 711
Preface VII
Preface
Robert Brownlee, in a talk given at the Monterey Containment

Symposium on August 26, 1981, said:
"It has been said that there is no such thing as history, only
biography. Assuming this to be true, a description of the evolution
of containment would contain the story of the people involved - -
their experiments, beliefs, motivations, successes, failures, foibles,
and idiosyncrasies. We might then be able to understand our current
faith and practice, and their origins, in a far better way.
"Even for the earliest moments of containment of under-
ground nuclear tests, when the number of individuals involved in
the subject was very few, the complexity of the subject, and the
parallel and relatively independent pursuits of Los Alamos and
Livermore, make a retrieval of biographical knowledge quite im-
possible."
In that context, this book is an attempt to approach that
impossibility. It has been my pleasure to have had the opportunity
to talk with people I know who played a role in the development of
our current faith and practice. This book is really theirs, and that is
shown in the extensive quotations from people who have spent much
of their professional careers dealing with the truly difficult prob-
lems encountered. This book does not deal with the formulae and
the mathematics, the charts and graphs that make up the structure of
the scientific and engineering practice of the containment of under-
ground nuclear explosives. Those things can be found in the
documents and reports written by many of the individuals who have
worked in the field during the past thirty-five years or so.
Here there are only the recollections, memories, opinions, and
stories of some of those many people. Recollections can be faulty,
memories fade, opinions change, and stories often become better in
the telling, but taken as a whole they may convey something of how
we came to be where we are in the containment world.
One regret I have is that the quoted printed word does not
capture the emotional content of the spoken word - - the humor,
satire, frustration, sincerity that I heard during these talks that we
had. All are muted in a quotation on the printed page. The inflection
of a single word can change the way a statement is to be taken, but
how to convey that? The only way I know to attempt it is to give
some brief background on each of the people, in their own words.
Vlll CAGING THE DRAGON
That doesn't have to do directly with containment, but it does have

to do with perhaps putting the statements of that person in a personal
context.
As for the context of myself, I went in 1952 from being a newly
graduated graduate student who had done his thesis work at the U.
C. Radiation Laboratory, to work with Herb York on what he
initially described to me, somewhat vaguely, as a "small project."
I somehow got the impression that it would be in Berkeley, and
would deal with controlled fusion as a source of power, and indeed
that was what I started to do. A few months later I had moved to
Livermore with my family, and by then I was aware that the "small
project" was a second nuclear weapons design Laboratory. Nine
years later the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory had a
staff of perhaps 5000 people, and I became involved with nuclear
test work.
Since that time in 1961 I have been associated with the test
program of the United States in various capacities. First as the
Division Leader of L Division, the people at Livermore responsible
for the design and fielding of the diagnostic measurements on
Livermore nuclear experiments. Later as the person responsible for
the overall Livermore Test Program, and since 1971 as the Chair-
man of the DOE-NVO Containment Evaluation Panel, whose func-
tion is better explained later in this book.
I can say from my own knowledge that the people, my friends,
whose words are quoted in this book, are all dedicated individuals
who grappled with the dragon, and eventually caged him, albeit
uneasily, because they retained their sense of perspective, and of the
limitations of their knowledge, while doing so. I did not say
"subdued him", because they know, as I know, that whenever a
nuclear explosion occurs he is there, just as enormously strong,
clever, and dangerous as ever. Those who may be called upon
someday to do an underground detonation should remember that.
The amount of energy released by a "small" one kiloton nuclear
device is simply beyond human experience and comprehension,
except possibly that of the unfortunate people in Japan who were
near the second and third nuclear detonations.
IX
It was the Department of Energy Nevada Operations Office

which supported this work, and to the people there, particularly
Richard Navarro, I give my grateful acknowledgement. Byron
Ristvet of the Department of Defense Defense Nuclear Agency was
principally responsible for arranging the support required for the
printing of the book. Without his interest and the Defense Nuclear
Agency's support, the publication of this work might well not have
happened.
The people I talked with were always cooperative in giving me
their time for the interviews and for editing the transcripts, and my
thanks go to each of those quoted in the text. Gary Higgins and Bob
Brownlee were generous with their time in reviewing the book and
offered many valuable suggestions on various points.
The table on page 572 was compiled by Gregory Van der Vink
of OTA. The pictures in the book were provided by Roger Meade
of Los Alamos, Steve Wofford of Livermore, and John Weydert of
Sandia. My appreciation also goes to the unknown Livermore artist
who, in the early seventies, captured the feeling of many people who
were grappling with containment problems.
Particular thanks are due two people. Beverly Babcock as-
sisted with many of the interviews and transcriptions. She was also
most helpful in such matters as arranging times and places for the
interviews, and gently encouraging the interviewees to finish and
return their edits. Aside from providing photographs for the illus-
trations, Steve Wofford gave unfailing support on many questions
of how best to arrange the chapters and format the text. He deserves
my thanks for helping in a very substantial way on this project.
1
Introduction
The science of the containment of the radioactive by-products

of a nuclear detonation exists only because there was a period of
from 1957 to 1992 when nuclear detonations were carried out
underground by the United States, the Soviet Union, the United
Kingdom, and France.
The elements of several scientific and engineering fields are
inextricably intertwined when people attempt to understand, calcu-
late, and predict what will happen when a nuclear detonation occurs
underground. The interactions which occur do so in regimes of
material interactions, times, temperatures, and pressures that are
never encountered in any other field.
The earth, from the surface to the mile or so in depth that has
been used in underground nucleartesting is an inhomogeneous body
of materials. Such things as the density, the strength , the chemical
composition, and the water content of the rocks vary in a three
dimensional fashion over almost any dimensional element that is
chosen, ranging from molecular size to kilometers. Given the
volume over which significant effects take place, the expense of
obtaining sufficient representative samples to test in the laboratory,
and the fact that laboratory measurements cannot reproduce many
ofthe regimes of interest, it is not possibleto knowall, oreven most,
of the details ofthe medium where the detonation takes place.
So, empirical rules are developed, approximations are made
and are used in computer codes to model the behavior ofthe earth
materials following a detonation, but there is a further complica-
tion. Important processes occur during a time span that ranges from
fractions of a microsecond to hours. Different measurement tech-
niques and different calculational codes are required for different
parts of this time span, and somehow must be linked together to try
to understand the overall picture of what happens.
In such a situation experience and empirical evidence from
previous detonations assumes a considerable importance when try-
ing to judge what will happen when a particular detonation takes
place in some specific location. The experience and evidence that
there is has been gathered over the years, sometimes in a costly
fashion. Experience and its role in judgement is difficult to codify
and make available to people who might be newly charged with the
responsibility to detonate a device, obtain the necessary data from
2
it, and simultaneously "successfully contain" the radioactive mate-

rials produced. Such a situation may never arise; if it does perhaps
the words here may be helpful.
3
1
The Origins of Containment
To discuss the containment of nuclear explosions it would be

helpful to have an understanding of what "containment" is. Unfor-
tunately, there is no simple definition, or indeed, no uniform agree-
ment as to what it is. Basically, it is whatever someone in the
appropriate position of authority says it is, as is the case with many
politically defined terms. And that also means that what it is can
change from time to time.
There are documents which shed some light on this. The most
important is the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed on August 5, 1963
by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
This Treaty called for the signatory nations to conduct nuclear
detonations only underground, and in such a way that there would
be no nuclear debris beyond the boundaries of the State which
conducted the detonation. The operative article of the Treaty which
relates to what would become "containment", as it is currently
known in the United States, is Article I, Section 1. of the English
version.
Article I
1. Each of the Parties to this Treaty undertakes to
prohibit, to prevent, and not to carry out any nuclear
weapon test explosion, or any other nuclear explosion, at
any place under its jurisdiction or control:
(a) in the atmosphere; beyond its limits, including outer
space; or underwater, including territorial waters or
high seas; or
(b) in any other environment if such explosion causes
radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial
limits of the State under whose jurisdiction or control
such explosion is conducted.
This seems clear enough, but there are some things that, on
careful examination of subparagraph (b), are open to interpretation.
The first, and most important of these, are the words " . . . causes
6 CAGING THE DRAGON
radioactive debris to be p r e s e n t . . . " What comprises the radioac-

tive debris of a nuclear explosion? Is it any radioactive product
produced by the explosion? Or is it only those radioactive products
which will ultimately be deposited on the ground, and thereby
become "debris" - - the dictionary definition of which is: "The
scattered remains of something broken or destroyed; ruins"? This
could be interpreted as meaning that if you cannot go about the
ground and find "scattered remains," or fallout particles, you have
not violated the Treaty. Hence, any release of noble gases, which
dilute in the atmosphere, which are biologically inert, and which do
not deposit on the ground, do not count. The answer to this question
of interpretation is of considerable importance to the people who are
charged with conducting a nuclear detonation, and at the same time
with complying with the terms of the Treaty.
With one interpretation, a seepage of gases from a detonation,
however large, would not be considered a violation, no matter where
or how detected, because they would not be considered "debris."
Using the other interpretation, such a seepage would be a violation,
if large enough to be detected outside the State boundaries.
Now consider the words ". . . to be present outside the
territorial limits of the State under whose jurisdiction or control .
. ." In order for something to exist in this context, somebody has
to know it's there. If radioactive material did cross the border of the
State conducting the detonation, and someone, with some instru-
ment, did detect the activity, then the Treaty has been violated. If
the material is not detected outside the territorial limits, for what-
ever reason, it is difficult, or impossible to claim that a violation has
occurred.
Another document that can be considered as defining
containment in the United States is the Charter of the Containment
Evaluation Panel. The relevant passages concerning containment
itself are Articles III, subparagraphs A and C, and Article VIII
subparagraph F. These are:
III A Emplacement and firing of each nuclear device will

be conducted in a manner that conforms with United
States obligations under all Nuclear Test Treaties.
Origins 1
III C Each test will be designed to be successfully

contained. Special cases will be referred to DOE/Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Military Application (DASMA),
for approval.
VIII F Successful Containment: Containment such that
a test results in no radioactivity detectable off site as
measured by normal monitoring equipment and no unan-
ticipated release of radioactivity on site within a 24 hour
period following execution. Detection of noble gases
which appear on site at long times after an event due to
changing atmospheric conditions is not unanticipated.
Anticipated releases will be designed to conform to spe-
cific guidance from DOE/DASMA (NV-176, Revision 5,
Planning Directive for Underground Nuclear Tests at the
Nevada Test Site (U)).
Note that the word "debris" does not appear. For there to be
successful containment, it is "radioactivity" that is not to be de-
tected off site, and this term certainly includes the noble gases. The
boundaries of the Test Site are much closer to the event than the
borders of the United States, hence "successful containment" is a
much more rigorous standard than that given by using either inter-
pretation of "debris" in the Treaty. Further, there should be "no
unanticipated release of radioactivity on site within a 24 hour period
following execution." The implication is that an unanticipated
release of any amount of radioactivity within the 24 hour period is
a failure to achieve successful containment. The monitoring equip-
ment which might be used to detect such an unanticipated release is
not specified, unlike the case of detection off site where "normal
monitoring equipment," whatever that is, is to be used.
What occurred between 1945 and 1963 that led to the Treaty,
generally known as the Partial Test Ban Treaty?
It's almost always true of any organization that there are
outside influences that make that organization change. It
seldom comes from within. V. Leimbach
And so it was with the Atomic Energy Commission, the Labo-

ratories, and the field test organizations.
8 CAGING THE DRAGON
Trinity, the first nuclear detonation, was carried out on July 16,
1945, atop a 100 foot tower. For the next many years that was one
of the basic methods for doing experiments with nuclear devices.
There were variations, of course; the air drop and the underwater
detonations in Crossroads are examples. Sometimes the tower was
short, or non-existent, and the device was detonated on the surface.
Sometimes a plane dropped the device to detonate in the air. Or
sometimes a balloon, or rocket, lifted the device to a desired
altitude, there to be detonated.
For the scientists seeking information about the performance
of some aspect of the device, there were trade-offs. The turnaround
between experiments could be markedly decreased by using planes
or balloons, but it was not possible to do experiments that depended
on accurately viewing some particular area of the the device where
phenomena of interest were taking place. Towers allowed that, but
it took a long time to build the towers, and install the carefully
collimated and aligned pipes through which instruments viewed a
particular area, and recorded the data from there.
There were other differences among the ways in which the
experiments were done, and these related to what happened to the
radioactive material that was produced by the detonation. It was
these considerations which gradually shaped the way in which
experiments could be carried out, and eventually led to the firing of
all devices underground in such a way that no radioactivity entered
the atmosphere.
Initially, the approach to the radioactive products of the deto-
nation was to disperse and dilute them, hopefully to a degree that
made them of little biological consequence to people who might
encounter them. It was an application of a belief once commonly
held, not only by those detonating nuclear devices but by those
running factories and other industrial sites which produced unpleas-
ant and possibly dangerous by-products of the materials they pro-
duced:
The solution to pollution is dilution.
With this approach, if you were dumping waste chemicals into
a river, and the river became badly fouled, what you needed was a
bigger river, so there would be more dilution. The concept of
controlling by-products of an activity at the source came slowly,
and only as a result of public concerns.
Origins 9
After the end of World War II the United States conducted

nuclear experiments at Bikini, and later at Enewetak as well. There
was the Crossroads operation at Bikini in 1946, and the Sandstone
operation at Enewetak in 1948.
Crossroads consisted of two 21 kiloton detonations; one air-
burst on June 30, and an underwater detonation on July 24, 1946.
These were weapons effects tests, to investigate effects of a nuclear
detonation on ships and other military equipment. In Sandstone
there were three devices of various yields fired, all on towers,
between April 14 and May 14, 1948. There was a significant
difference from the focus on the effects of the Crossroads detona-
tions - - information about the performance of the devices them-
selves was an integral part of the Sandstone operation.
Crossroads and Sandstone were basically ship-based with mini-
mal support facilities on the atolls themselves. By 1951, when the
Greenhouse operation was held from April 7 to June 24, 1951,
permanent facilities had been built on Enewetak.
Bob Campbell became one of the Los Alamos Test Directors,
and although he did not participate in either Crossroads or Sand-
stone, he later had extensive experience in both the Pacific, and in
Nevada, starting with Operation Ivy, in the Pacific, in 1952.
Campbell: Enewetak was first used in ' 4 8 , for Sandstone, and
the whole nine yards of that thing was done by the Corps of
Engineers; U.S. Army types. And there were a number of lessons
learned on that. The AEC made their imprint on Greenhouse. The
operation itself was in '5 1, but there was well over a year and a half
buildup. They had a big structures program, and all the housing,
warehousing - - essentially everything out there that we used for
Greenhouse - - was built by the AEC. They did a much better job
than the Corps of Engineers, because they had the idea that they
were going to operate these things for ever and a day. It wasn't
going to be done in the style of a Task Force campaign.
You can go back and look at the testing. The reason for Trinity
was obvious; to see if the thing would work once. Then there were
the Japanese things. Then there was a big hue and cry by the Navy,
and so there was Crossroads. That was a Navy show; r'' this Lab did
was provide the detonation service. And the Navy did themselves
proud with Crossroads.
10 CAGING THE DRAGON
Then it was the Army's turn with Sandstone, but by that time
the Lab had an interest in it too, because they had some new designs
to try. So, it was more or less a joint venture. In fact, it was a little
more than a joint venture. The Army really acted as support to the
Lab on Sandstone. •
The Laboratory group who did those operations was formed
the same way as it had been in the past. You take somebody from
this division, somebody from that division, and somebody from over
here, put together a campaign, and go do it. Everybody comes back
and then goes back to their regular jobs. At the end of Sandstone,
Darol Froman, who had been the senior Lab person there, realized
that wasn't going to cut it. It was going to go on and on, and so in
' 4 9 , the year after Sandstone, they formed J Division, a permanent
testing division, in the Laboratory.
Froman saw the need of it, and I've seen a fair amount of his
correspondence on it. He wrote some rather persuasive papers on
why it would be better if they faced up to it and said, "Here it is;
we're going to be doing this for the rest of our lives." And I think
the AEC was right in listening to him, and going along with a
permanent plant at Enewetak atoll.
Operations in the Pacific, at what was called the Pacific
Proving Ground (the PPG), were expensive, time consuming, and
required considerable military resources to support the operation,
the civilian construction workers who built the camps, the bunkers,
and the towers, and the scientific teams who came to install the
devices and the diagnostics. The construction started a year to a
year and a half before the actual tests began.
Gerry Johnson, after a short time as a weapons designer,

became responsible for the Livermore field efforts, and then be-
came one of the Livermore Test Directors.
Johnson: Shooting in the atmosphere required big task forces,
and as a consequence we could not have continuous operations.
You had to mobilize, put things together, shoot them all in an
interval, then return to the Laboratories and try to figure out what
happened, rework the designs, and design new experiments.
In addition to that, the operations were complicated, unduly
complicated, because there were thousands of people in the field.
They were spectacular shows, people liked to see them, and so they
Origins 11
dreamed up all sorts of reasons for being there. That meant if you
were trying to manage the operations, you had several thousand
people to tfy to keep track of. If anything went wrong, any
confusion, you had a hell of a time getting them out of there, and
getting it straightened out so you could do your work.
After Sandstone there were no more shots in the Pacific for
almost three years, until the first event of Greenhouse on April 7,
1951. In the meantime there was an exploration for a possible
location in the United States where low yield detonations could be
carried out, without the cost and time required for the Pacific tests.
The Korean War led to the declaration of a national emergency
by President Truman on December 16, 1950. Two days after that
declaration the President authorized the AEC to establish a proving
ground for nuclear tests on the Las Vegas-Tonopah Test Range.
Various locations had been looked at during the 1948-1949 period.
Ultimately a choice had to be made.
Brownlee: The Nevada Test Site location was selected by AI
Graves. He got on an airplane with somebody, they flew around,
and he found this nice area . You could put some boundaries around
it, there was a road to it on the south side, and it looked like it would
be easy to build roads.
So, the criteria used for the selection of the Test Site had
nothing to do with whether there would be atmospheric or under-
ground shots. It was just a place we could get our hands on. And
it was a place that had a road to it, and a place where you could land
airplanes; it was an accessible place.
And there is another thing. When AI was selecting the Site, he
was selecting a place where Los Alamos could go to do interim kinds
of things, and a place where we could have our failures. We could
have a failure there, because if it didn't work we could come back
here, and in a few days have another thing ready to try. Once we
got the various problems worked out, then we would go to the
Pacific to do the real experiment. That was the concept.
So, the Nevada Test Site was selected by Los Alamos as a place
where you could do certain experiments before you went to the
Pacific to the permanent test site - - the Pacific Proving Ground.
When we removed the people from Enewetak, in the Marshall

Islands, that was expected to be, at one point in time, permanent.
We didn't anticipate them going back.
The object of the NTS was to do experiments close to home so
you could go over to the Pacific to do the real thing. So, you did
the low yield here, and you'd find out what wouldn't work. When
you got ready to do one that really worked, you went to the Pacific.
That concept was believed, and held, and fostered by people here
at Los Alamos for, I would guess, four years. That was a long time
in those days. And then we realized that Nevada was good enough
that we could do a lot of things there that were not originally
intended to be done there.
With the approval to do continental te.sting, things moved
rapidly. The Ranger operation consisted of five airdrop detonations
which were done in eleven days from January 27 to February 6, 1951
at the (then) Nevada Proving Grounds. There were two devices with
a yield of 1 kiloton, two with yields of 8 kilotons, and one of 22
kilotons. All were detonated at 1000 feet or more altitude.
There was also the first of the things which would lead to
todays's world of "successful containment." Fallout from one of
the Ranger events left measurable amounts of radiation in Roches-
ter, New York, deposited during a snowstorm.
Of course, from 1951, when the first tests were done at the
Nevada Proving Grounds, until 1963, there was no Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty, and from 1951 until 1961 there were no requirements for any
type of containment in the conduct of a test at the (now) Nevada Test
Site. If the concept of containment is considered in a broad context,
it relates fundamentally to a way to mitigate the effects of the
radioactivity produced during a nuclear explosion. These effects
can be quite close to the place of the detonation, they can take place
at considerable distances, they can be global in extent.
Such effects began to be a problem soon after tests began in
Nevada. By 1953, in the operation called Upshot-Knothole, air-
drops were used less and less, and devices with yields up to 32 kt
(Harry), and 43 kt (Simon) were fired on towers. Both of those
events caused off site fallout problems. In the case of Simon, some
off site cars were contaminated, and had to be washed down. In the
case of Harry, the people of St. George, Utah were told to stay
indoors from nine until noon, to reduce exposures from the fallout
Origins 13
on the community, and the passage of the radioactive cloud. There

was fallout in Troy, New York, deposited in rain which fell. There
were reports (and later lawsuits) that hundreds of sheep in the Nancy
and Harry fallout patterns had died, presumably due to exposure to
the radioactive products of those events. The general public began
to be aware of the actuality of, and the hazards associated with, the
radioactive material from the nuclear tests at the NTS.
Worldwide attention was drawn to the dangers of fallout when
the 15 megaton Bravo event of Operation Castle was fired on
February 28, 1954. A Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon,
was some 80 miles from the detonation, and was in the fallout
pattern. By the time it returned to Japan several members of the
crew required hospitalization for the effects of the exposures they
had received, and one died during treatment. Some 236 Marshallese
and 31 weather service personnel who were on downwind atolls,
well removed from Enewetak and Bikini, were also exposed, as
were personnel on the ships of the Task Force.
Bill Ross was a participant during Castle, responsible for the
mechanical hardware that was to be used for Livermore measure-
ments on the Los Alamos Bravo event.
Ross: I was on the Curtis. We were issued the glasses the night
before, told to wear long sleeved shirts, and that sort of thing. We
were about thirty-five miles away. You kind of wondered, you
know. There'd been the orderly room speculation about setting the
atmosphere on fire, splitting the world in half into two pieces, and
all that. And you began to wonder whether they really were
seriously talking about what actually might happen.
Of course, the shot point was below the horizon. There was
this tremendous light and heat, although you couldn't feel the heat
at first. There was just the tremendous light. Even with the very
dark glasses you were squinting. And then the heat came as the
fireball got above the horizon, and it just got hotter, and hotter, and
hotter. We had been warned to hang on because of the shock wave.
By that time it was just so spectacular I'd forgotten all about that
warning, and I was just standing there. All of a sudden it looked like
a gauze curtain coming at you, smoothing out the little ripples of the
water. There was a bang, and from then on there was just a roar,
a tremendous roaring that seemed to go on for a long time. Finally
the light got so dim that you were opening your eyes wide and
straining, and then you remembered, oh, I've got these goggles on.
When you took the goggles off it was still very bright. The goggles
were a darn sight darker than welding goggles. It was very
impressive.
We started to get into the fallout, and the commanding officer
of the Curtis got out from under the fallout. But, the Navy didn't
like their ships all going in different directions, each commanding
officer deciding which way to go, so they were all told to regroup
around the Estes, where the task force commander was, which was
right under the cloud, so they all went back into the fallout. We just
had a little bit of fallout and got out from under it, and they washed
the decks down. We were back out on the deck again when they got
ordered to regroup. We went back in, and here it comes down
again. Then we were locked in, and they were hosing down.
My stateroom was right near where the swabbies were going
out on the deck and cleaning up, and they had a monitoring station
there. These guys would go out in their raincoats and boots, and
they would hose and sweep. When they came in they would strip
and pile the stuff on the floor, step over two feet, and a guy would
go over them with a counter. It was into the showers if you showed
more than 2 mR above background. All this time the pile of clothing
background is growing. At one point they were looking for the
difference between 100 and 102 mR per hour. They were doing
the monitoring in a 100 mR per hour field.
I don't remember how long we had to stay inside, but it was
many, many hours. This thing went off at five o'clock in the
morning, and we didn't get fallout coming down on us until after we
had eaten, as I remember. We got a little bit, got out from under
it, cleaned up, and were out on the deck around nine or ten, and
then it was back in again. I don't remember when we got out. Herb
Weidner and some of the other guys who were over on the aircraft
carrier Bairoko, they were in a high field for days. The hanger deck
was running, if I remember, a number of hundred mR per hour for
hours, and then they were down around 5 mR per hour for days
afterwards. They got a lot of exposure. In fact, the Bairoko never
did get cleaned up.
Origins 15
I didn't see the fallout, but I was told by the guys who were
sweeping it up and hosing it off that it was like a white dust. It was
calcined coral. An awful lot of stuff went up, and it falls out, it
definitely does. If you read the story of the Lucky Dragon, they got
caught in the same kind of mess.
After Bravo, and the Lucky Dragon, fallout was no longer just
a local concern, or a U.S. concern. Prime Minister Nehru, of India,
on April 2, 1954 called for a testing moratorium. Concerns in the
United States led to the Atomic Energy Commission finally to
release some information about fallout. Before this there had only
been releases saying, in essence, that whatever exposure people had
received from the fallout from detonations at the Test Site were not
large enough to cause any problems. No mention was made of the
levels of possible exposures, of what radioactive isotopes were
involved, or what areas were in the overall fallout pattern. It was on
February 12, 1955 that the Commision released a report titled "A
Report by the United Stastes Atomic Energy Commission on the
Effects of High Yield Nuclear Explsions". This report did talk
about both the Bravo test and the fallout from Nevada tests, but did
little, if anything to reduce the concerns of the public; in fact, it may
have exacerbated them. Commissioner William Libby did make a
public statement about the problems of radiation exposure, and
released scientific data about fallout in a talk he gave in June of
1955 to the alumni of the University of Chicago, wherein he made
the statement that fallout did not "constitute any real hazard to the
immediate health" of members of the public.
People working at the Test Site were having their own prob-
lems with both local and off-site deposition of radioactive material.
Campbell: After the St. George business, and after Bravo, it
became obvious that we couldn't continue to have that kind of off
site fallout. If we wanted to get our job done, we were going to have
to find different ways of doing things. I don't think it was the people
in Washington. It was really an internal recognition that we had to
do something. And on site it was our people who were getting
exposed making the recoveries. Believe me, radiation readings in
the fallout patterns were much higher in Area 3 than they were in
Utah, and we had to go in to get the data. The rule then was that
you could work people forever in 10 mr per hour fields. In Nevada
I don't believe I ever went into a field that was over 50 R. Fifty R
per hour is a lot, but you could get people who had not had much
exposure, and you could say, "The operation is almost over, you're
going home, and this is just for one time."
Operationally a number of things were tried, with the idea
being to protect our own people. In so doing there was, of course,
a benefit off site. They tried making large blacktop pads around
tower bases, asphalt pads, to keep from entraining so much dirt.
You could keep down quite a bit of the dirt that came flying up
otherwise. And then there were areas where boron was put down,
to reduce the soil activation. That was in about '55, or even before.
Towers we bought by the foot; we'd buy pieces for several
thousand feet of towers. Then you take bits and pieces, like an
erector set, and put up a two hundred foot, or three hundred foot
tower. We had towers that were triangular in cross section, and
towers that were square in cross section. The triangular things
twisted too easily in torsion, and wouldn't bear enough load either.
There was always the business of Herman Hoerlin wanting more
lead, or Ernie Krause wanting more of something else in the cab. We
tried aluminum towers to get away from the steel, but they didn't
work worth a damn Do you want a little steel, or do you want a lot
of aluminum? It ended up that the aluminum just did not have the
strength and rigidity. It wasn't too popular, so we were always
trying to find ways to use the aluminum towers we had in stock.
By 1956 people in the testing community were beginning to
consider seriously the possibilities of conducting tests underground.
This was a major shift in the thinking about the problem of fallout.
Previous efforts had been directed basically to dispersal and dilu-
tion; firing underground would be an attempt to control at the
source, to keep the radioactive material in one place, and not to let
it disperse.
Edward Teller and Dave Griggs in 1956 wrote a brief paper
(UCRL-1659) titled "Deep Underground Test Shots". In it they
concluded:
" 1 . The cost of drilling a hole sufficiently large and deep to
emplace and contain kiloton shots is comparable to the cost
of erecting a tower for such shots.
16a
i k M U a . ..*
Typical shot tower. Operation Teapot, 1955.
*3
16b
In an effort to reduce fallout, balloons were used in both the Plumbbob test series, 1957,
and the Hardtack II test series, 1958, to lift test devices to approximately 1,000 feet for
atmospheric detonation. Above is a typical example from the Plumbbob series.
Origins 17
"2. A depth of 3000 feet is ample to be sure of no surface

eruption from 30 kt and small-to-zero emanation of volatile
radioactive elements. One thousand feet will suffice for 1
kt.
" 3 . Yield can be determined within 5 to 10% by seismic and
time-of-shock arrival, with suitable calibration.
"4. Radiochemistry of the explosion products may be done by
core drilling the molten sphere. This may be expensive.
"5. Diagnostic experiments may have to be restricted to the
determination of the time-dependent gamma flux.
"6. Using an open hole, visual observation and interesting
neutron experiments may become possible.
"7. The seismic hazard to off site structures is nil.
"8. The long-term radiologic hazard is nil."
And, they recommended that in connection with the next
Nevada test series, (which would be Plumbbob, in 1957) a low yield
shot be detonated at the Test Site "at such a depth that it will be
contained."
At Los Alamos, Al Graves, head of the test effort, had arrived
at the same conclusion; the possibility of doing tests underground
had to be explored, because nuclear tests were going to have to be
done underground if testing in the United States, at the Nevada Test
Site, was to continue. No such events had ever been conducted, and
the state of ignorance was vast. There were no equations of state for
earth materials, and no codes into which to put them if they had
existed, and by today's standards, primitive computers to run them
on if the codes had existed. No one knew how big a cavity would be
formed, or what the post-shot cavity conditions would be. No one
knew what a safe burial depth was. No one knew what the ground
motion and seismic effects would be. And so on.
In 1956, Graves asked Bob Brownlee to look into what might
happen if a device were detonated underground.
Brownlee: One reason I admired AI Graves was because he was
so inordinately farsighted. He anticipated problems long before
other people. Where he came to have these ideas I have no idea;
whether they came from his colleagues, or whether they came from
the sky I don't know. He was the first one to my knowledge to ask
questions of a far-reaching kind about the hazards of testing. For
example, "Is there any chance that I will knock a piece of the shelf
off the reef, which will then slide down the edge of the atoll and start
a big wave of some kind? What's the chance of doing that?" As
people talked it over, they decided that could actually happen, and
so we moved some shots. But those kinds of unanswerable questions
were frequently asked by Al first, at least to my knowledge.
One experience with testing in Nevada which must have
influenced him mightily was that in '55 there was a civil defense test
where they sat out over two weeks before the weather was right.
They were very carefully watching where the fallout would go, and
if it was predicted to go over places where there were people who
couldn't be warned, and evacuated if need be, the shot was
cancelled for that day. That shot was scheduled every day, and then
cancelled, for nineteen days, and AI was the one making those
decisions. Now, there were a lot of civil defense people, and press
people, and others, whose hotel reservations were running out and
so on, and they were very impatient with all this. And AI was taking
that pressure.
He said to me, in 1956, "There isn't any doubt about it. If
testing is to proceed, we're going to have to go underground. It's
got to be done, whether we want to or not. Would you start working
on what it might be like to have a fireball underground?"
I was tied up for the '56 tests in the Pacific, but once they were
over AI said again, "Please go to work on underground things. It's
inevitable. We're going to have to do that, and the question is, 'Can
you contain anything at all? If you put the device underground,
does it just all blow out, or what?'" It was a very interesting
question, and I began doing some machine calculations. We were
doing work on the IBM 704's, which were quite new then.
Carothers: You were using, by today's standards, a rather
small machine. You were using a computer that had less capability
than the one you probably have at home now.
Brownlee: Oh, you can now carry around, in your shirt pocket,
something with more memory than the 704's had. We coded
everything in machine language in order to save memory. And we
had bits in the words which we used as flags, because you never did
any multiplication or division until the end, because that was so
slow. The programs were incredibly sophisticated in adapting
anything in the world to a little bit of memory, and to the machine's
characteristics. You spent all of your time doing that rather than
Origins 19
working on the problem. I had this big deck of cards that I would
feed into the machine, and if there was a card upside down it was
rejected. It was a very slow, laborious process, but that's what we
had in '57.
The earliest work I did was try to calculate the creation of a
cavity. I had the equations of state of four materials; aluminum,
uranium, air, and water. I said, "That's the old Greek concept of
earth, air, fire, and water. Earth was aluminum, fire was uranium,
and there was air, and water. With those four equations of state I
started trying to calculate what might happen underground. Now,
very quickly we began to get more refined equations of state, but
from those four I tried to make an equation of state for some fake
material. I tried to guess in what direction earth might be different
from aluminum, and started to change the various parameters. I
finally evolved what I called the equation of state of NTS dirt.
I look back on it all now in amazement. How could anybody
pay me to do such absolutely worthless calculations? And yet, the
fact is, they weren't all that bad. I created, in my initial calculations,
an elliptical cavity; I didn't really get a round cavity. That was
because of the inadequacies of my equations of state. Of course,
I didn't know enough to know what the answer should be, so, just
like every other theoretician, I fudged the numbers to make them
kind of match what I saw. By modern day standards it was an
abomination, but for the time it wasn't all that bad, and we were
educating ourselves.
Incidently, I feel very strongly about that. Machine calcula-
tions you should use to teach you how to think. You don't pay any
attention to the numbers, but they teach you how to think, and how
to see what is more important than something else. And that's
exactly what 1 was doing. I was getting a very good education. I
wasn't contributing anything profound to the system, but I sure was
getting a education about how to think about things. That's the real
value of that kind of work.
So, I did my first primitive calculations in '56. And I actually
calculated one test, Bernalillo, which we did in '58. That's how I
got into the underground business, and that was strictly due to Al
Graves, who recognized the necessity to go underground. There are
a lot of people who don't realize that we were doing the initial work
for underground tests as early as 1956. Now, remember, we didn't
do that until '63, totally.
One theme that was present in the early underground experi-
ments was that there was a definite self-interest for the Laboratories'
test organizations in reducing the fallout from the shots. There was
a need and a desire to reduce the fallout off site, and to respond to
the mounting public concerns, but also there was the need to reduce
the local fallout in the vicinity of the shot itself for operational
reasons.
Campbell: The first thing we at LASL did in a hole was called
Pascal-A. It was 500 feet deep, in a cased hole. We put the bomb
in the bottom of it, and we didn't stem it. So, we fired it. Biggest
damn Roman candle I ever saw! It was beautiful. Big blue glow in
the sky. I was up in the CP office, and that was fired from a little
handset, out at the B-] Y.
Carothers: You mean somebody sat out there, and as I've seen
in Tom Mix movies, pushed the plunger to blow up the dynamite
and foil the Bad Guys?
Campbell: Well, pretty close to that, but not quite. He had
a little hand firing set. The shot was in Area 3, down by 3-300. The
firing point was the nearest timing station of any size to Area 3, and
so the shot was between the people out there and the CP.
Bill Ogle was out there, in that timing station. When he saw
that come out of the ground he knew he couldn't come south the
way he came north, because he was going to get into trouble. Bill
was more excited that evening than I ever heard him before or since.
He was really excited about how they were going to get back. They
went way out east on roads that didn't exist, came back around into
Yucca Lake, and came in that way. You've heard people say, "His
eyes bulged out like a stomped-on toad"? That's what Ogle looked
like when he came into the ] Division office that night. He was really
excited, and talked a mile a minute. They were damn lucky they
didn't go right through that cloud.
Carothers: Why didn't you stem it?
Origins 21
Campbell: Didn't need to. We did have a lid on the hole.

Nobody's seen that since. We never did find that. On that lid was
one of Johnny Malik's detectors, and we wanted a line of sight to
see if we could measure some of the reactions. There was a kind of
plug in the hole. It was a couple of hundred feet off the bottom,
as I remember. All it was, was a concrete cylinder with a hole
through the center of it, so the detector could look through. And
it had an annulus, so it wouldn't bind anywhere going down. It was
suspended from the harness that was holding the bomb. It was a
collimator, not a plug that was supposed to stem the hole. We never
found that collimator either, and it was about five feet thick.
We had a half dozen of those holes drilled in an arc around
station 3-300, our alpha station. We were in the business of making
the transition from towers that were looked at from the station. All
our scopes were in there, and we were trying to get something where
we could use the same recording gear without having to move it.
But anyhow, bad as it was, spectacular as it was, there was only
about a tenth of the radiation on the ground around there that there
would have been if we had done it on the surface. And we
considered a factor of ten reduction to be wonderful. We thought
we had made a real gain. A factor often meant we could get back,
and get set up and fire again more quickly. We were very happy with
the results, and we did it all over again on Pascal-B. That one doesn't
stick in my mind like that first blue one. That was our initiation.
The reduction in off site fallout was an effect that was appre-
ciated by the AEC, and the people who worried about off site safety.
What we were worried about was being put out of business if we had
too many people pounding on the gates. And, we wanted to reduce
the local fallout, the contamination of the area that we were using.
Jumping ahead to the moratorium, it turned out that we had
a little money, and we drilled holes against the day that we might
come out of the moratorium. We really thought that was the
direction we were going to go.
Bob Brownlee, who had been asked to look at the possibility of
firing shots underground, helped to design the Pascal experiments,
and attempted to approach the problem in an orderly fashion. That
was sometimes difficult.
Brownlee: Our first underground tests were done in '57.

There was Pascal-A, and Pascal-B, and Pascal-C. And there were
several others in '58, during Hardtack II. AI asked the following
question, "If I take a 48 inch casing, and I put a bomb a couple of
hundred feet down, by how much will the fallout be reduced?" We
discovered it was a factor greater than ten. And that was just an
open hole. So, he then said, "If we put some plugs in the hole, does
that cut it even further? And if so, how much?" So we did that.
Then he said, "Let's put a plug right down on top of the bomb, and
then let's put a plug half way down. Does that make any differ-
ence?" And yes, it does a better job if you put the plug right on top
of the bomb. "Well, suppose we put in some dirt. Does that help?"
We started exactly that way. We were still doing atmospheric
shots, so the question was a very simple one. "If you do this, or that,
how much will you cut the fallout?" And we determined that
experimentally. The answer to the fallout question was, "We'll
measure it and see." On the other hand, the calculations I did
calculated the time the shock would get to the top, what kind of top
you might put on the hole to hold things in, what would the
pressures be there, how big might the cavity get, how does it cool,
and what happens to all that pressure? Does it lift the ground?
Those kinds of questions.
Pascal-B and Pascal-C had plugs, but Pascal-A did not, although
it had a concrete collimator in it for the detector at the surface. The
guys had been working trying to get it ready, and there had been a
number of troubles. They finally got it down hole, by my recollec-
tion, about ten o'clock or so at night. There wasn't much time to
go back into Mercury, go to bed, and get up the next morning to
shoot it, so somebody said, "Why don't we just shoot it now, and
then go in?" And it was the world's Finest Roman candle, because
at night it was all visible. Blue fire shot hundreds of feet in the air.
Everybody was down in the area, and they all jumped in their cars
and drove like crazy, not even counting who was there and who
came out of the area. Today it would give the Test Controller and
his Panel total apoplexy - - they would become totally insensate.
It wasn't done quite as logically as I have indicated, but there
was a thread of logic from shot to shot. We saw what happened on
one, and decided what to do next, but in the meantime we would
have another one. So, the chronology is not as perfect as you'd like
to think it was.
Origins 23
One of the things we were annoyed about in '57 and '58 - -

I remember being annoyed, and I say we because 1 think there were
a number of us - - was that we'd do an underground shot, and the
radioactivity from an atmospheric test would be floating by at such
high levels we'd never know what came out. The object of the
underground shot was to see how much we could reduce the fallout,
but we couldn't differentiate that fallout from the fallout of the
atmospheric shot, which was so much greater. So, I thought, "Why
in thunder are we doing this? The whole object is to find out what
happened on this underground shot, and after it's over we don't
know whether it leaked or not, or how much. This is absurd. Why
don't those guys knock it off?" I remember having that kind of an
attitude, and I think there were several of us that were annoyed. But
the right hand usually doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and
all that.
At the Livermore Laboratory, stimulated by the Teller and
Griggs report, work was being done to fire a low yield device in a
tunnel, with the object of completely containing all the debris
produced. Gerry Johnson was in charge of the Livermore testing
program, and was the Livermore Test Director.
Johnson: It was becoming increasingly difficult to carry out
tests in Nevada because of the fallout constraints, and the public
furor over the fallout. There was a rising public concern that kept
growing through those years. In Nevada, from an operator's point
of view, we were only interested in getting the developmental
information. Actually, 1956 was when we began to think about
underground shots, and we were interested from an operational
point of view. We felt if we could go underground and get the data,
then we could treat it as an extension of the Laboratory. We'd go
out and shoot whenever we were ready to shoot, without this big
Task Force and large numbers of people, because as you know,
underground shots are pretty dull to look at. And the duller the
better.
Carothers: Somebody said, "Watching an underground shot is
like watching a submarine race."
Johnson: I've never heard that, but you're right. That's a good
way to put it. One of the big questions we had was how to seal the
tunnel, but out of a lot of stewing around the Rainier experiment was
finally designed, and we fired it in September of ' 5 7 . And it did
contain.
The Rainier event was fired in B-tunnel on September 19,
1957. Even by today's definitions, Rainier was successfully con-
tained. The dragon was caged, and his foul breath no longer
polluted the air. Considering the lack of knowledge at that time
about the phenomenology of an underground detonation, that fact is
somewhat remarkable. After Rainier, perhaps containment even
seemed easy.
hubris: n. Excessive pride, arrogance. From the Greek.
Meanwhile, two different paths were leading to changes in the

way in which nuclear tests were conducted. Since the Bravo fallout
problems, opposition to continued testing had been increasing in the
United States, with wide publicity given to the anti-testing or anti-
bomb views of Linus Pauling, Albert Schweitzer, Paul Jacobs, and
others. There were anti-bomb demonstrations in England, West
Germany, and Japan. Politically, the issue of testing arose during
the 1956 presidential campaign, and influenced the steps that were
being taken to negotiate a disarmament treaty with the Soviet
Union. In August of 1958 President Eisenhower announced that
United States would suspend testing for a year once test ban
negotiations were begun on November 1, 1958, in Geneva.
The Hardtack operation had been conducted at the PPG from
April to the middle of August in 1958. With the announcement of
a moratorium to begin at the end of October, Hardtack Phase II
began some thirty days after the last shot in the Pacific.
During Hardtack Phase II Los Alamos conducted six safety
shots in unstemmed holes, with yields ranging from zero to a few
tens of tons. These events in unstemmed holes were not designed to
be completely contained; the objective was still to reduce contami-
nation in the immediate vicinity of the ground zero, and to experi-
ment with various plug and stemming locations and configurations.
Livermore did seven tunnel events during this period. There
was one tunnel event which introduced those people interested in
containment to the possibility of an unexpectedly high yield, or as
24a
September 12, 1958, Otero event, unstemmed hole.
fe
. ~'-j*-**JPit.jl£fi" ;-*-*\'*5i
September 12, 1958, Otero event, unstemmed hole.

24b
Surface structure for Otero event.

Origins 25
some people might say, the unreliability of designers. Neptune was

fired on October 14, 1958, as a safety experiment with an expected
yield of zero, but with a possible yield of 10 tons or so. It was fired
in a tunnel, with a working point that was under the sloping face of
the mesa, with a vertical distance of 110 feet to the surface, and a
slant range of 100 feet to the closest point of the mesa. The yield of
116 tons was unexpected, the shot vented, and produced a crater.
The fact that some of the radioactivity was released was not of real
concern; Hardtack II was, after all, principally a series of atmo-
spheric shots, and the day before Neptune the Lea event, with a 1.4
kt device suspended from a balloon, had been fired. The Livermore
people, showing considerable flexibility in their thinking, promptly
called Neptune a nuclear cratering experiment, and in a future report
(UCRL-5766 The Neptune Event; A Nuclear Cratering Experi-
ment) discussed the "major contributions of the data to the theory
and prediction of cratering phenomenology."
Carothers: In '58 Livermore fired a shot, called Neptune, in
a tunnel. It turned out that it gave somewhat more yield than was
expected, and it vented out the side of the mountain. People have
said to me, "That Gerry ]ohnson, he was probably the world's
foremost optimist. We don't know how he did it, but he could take
a disaster and convince everybody it was a great success. On
Neptune he just didn't pay any attention to the idea that shot was
supposed to be contained. He said, 'Well, that's our first nuclear
cratering experiment.'"
Is that a true story?
]ohnson: Yes, that's correct. I was told the maximum possible
yield was ten tons. That was the absolute tops. So we designed it
for ten tons, and it went a hundred or so.
It was a lousy cratering experiment. It was on a sloping hill, but
it was a point on the curve. But you're right - - you'll find that listed
with the cratering shots in the Plowshare program, and it had lots
of analyses done on it.
Gary Higgins, at Livermore, was beginning to explore the
possibility of collecting what were called prompt radchem samples.
The thought was that if some kind of pipe could be designed that
would be emplaced in such a way as to look directly at the device,
allow a flow of some very small fraction, but no more, of the device
debris to a collector on the surface, the expense and time delay of the
post-shot drilling for samples of the device debris could be avoided.
Dick Heckman was part of the group that was to field and collect the
samples which might be obtained.
Heckman: We started off with a few of the safety shots. The
one incident that I remember in particular was the Neptune event,
in Hardtack Phase II. There was about a one-inch diameter pipe
which ran down into the roof of the room. The hole was drilled
vertically, preshot, and this one-inch pipe was inserted and grouted
into place. We had a plywood box built on top with a two foot by
two foot aircraft-type filter material with the appropriate screen,
and with just a discharge on up. With the yield that was anticipated,
everything should really be kind of nice after the shot.
We then backed off down to the Area 12 CP. I requisitioned
a pair of binoculars, and braced myself on my vehicle so I could spot
in on the location. With binoculars I could see the little sampling
box, and since our success hadn't been all that good on safety shots,
I thought if something were to happen, maybe I could follow the
trajectory of the box so I'd know where to go and find it. The event
went off, and the yield was quite a bit higher than they expected.
As a matter of fact, that was one of the first cratering shots that the
Plowshare program takes credit for. The binoculars did no good,
because the ground shock hit the surface, raised a dust cloud, and
I couldn't see a thing.
I got a bunch of radiochemists, and we went up and we saw the
the filter box was there, in the crater. 1 argued like a Dutch uncle,
and got permission, which in retrospect was a dumb thing to do, but
I got permission to get a rope tied around myself, and to be let down
into the crater. We were pretty motivated in those days.
So I crawled down, and indeed found the filter box. 1 tore the
filter paper out, but the pipe had shut off and so we had no sample.
Now, when I was given permission to go down into this crater, it
was, "Under no circumstances will you go into a field which is
greater than 1 R per hour," because they expected this big fallout.
Well, going down there with my survey meter, I found out that
the activity was incredibly low - - a few tens of mR per hour. In
hindsight, as a result of attempting to do that recovery, we got some
very important information that really excited some of the Plow-
share people. When I came back and reported this, Vay Shelton and
Origins 27
Gerry Johnson happened to be down there at the time, and their

eyes lit up. It was sort of, "You've made the discovery, clearly you
would want to publish the paper." At this point, the sampling
system didn't work, so as far as I was concerned there were other
things to worry about. But it was my crew in that recovery who were
the first ones to discover that it was possible to do a cratering shot
and trap the gross radioactivity down in the ground. Remember that
all the previous experience had been with military cratering shots,
which were underburied.
Two of the tunnel events in the Hardtack II operation were
designed to give appreciable yield. Logan, fired two days after
Neptune, produced about five kilotons, and was successfully con-
tained. Blanca, fired on October 30, 1958 produced 22 kilotons, and
like Neptune, but in a more spectacular fashion, vented out the face
of the mesa.
The Logan event was interesting for several reasons. It was an
event in a tunnel, designed to investigate the effects of the nuclear
radiation on various materials. There was a horizontal vacuum line-
of-sight pipe which extended for 1 50 feet from the device, opening
to two feet in diameter at the far end. From there two six-inch
diameter pipes extended another 75 feet. The design team started
with some money, with very little Laboratory manpower support
available due to the heavy shot schedule already planned, support
from some contractors, a pad of blank paper, a tunnel that was still
being dug, and six weeks to design the experiments and the diagnos-
tics, fabricate the hardware, and have everything installed for the
shot. That is an incredibly short time scale by today's standards.
And, Logan was successfully contained. Arnold Clark was the
project physicist for Logan.
Clark: We had six weeks, because we had to shoot two weeks
before the end of October. We were going to shoot in a tunnel,
which hadn't been finished being dug yet, where an important shot,
Blanca, was going to be shot in another part. So, they had to have
two more weeks after we shot to finish off the cabling for Blanca.
They would finish digging out a side drift place for us, and they'd
pull cable for us. Our biggest problem was that we wanted a vacuum
pipe in the tunnel. Here we were, starting with a blank piece of
paper, and we had five weeks to have that pipe finished, installed,
and pumped down.
They said, "How long do you want it?" We looked at our blank
piece of paper, and said, "A hundred and fifty feet." "How big
around?" "Oh, about this big," making a cirle with our arms. And
that was the process we went through to specify it. So, we had a 150
foot vacuum pipe, maximum diameter of two feet, made byNRL in
Washington. It was flown out, installed, and evacuated. And it held
a vacuum ! In five weeks !
Lockheed made a very fancy, very strong steel sample holder
to put at the 150 foot station. Then people had second thoughts
about that station, and said, "That is not going to survive. Or maybe
it's not going to survive." They didn't know. "Maybe we better go
out farther." So, we extended the pipe by adding two pipes, 6
inches in diameter, to the back end of the big one, to go out another
75 feet. And that's all that survived; the 225 foot stuff. We never
saw any of that 150 foot station after the shot. That was where the
container of very special steel, made by Lockheed, had been. It was
a huge thing, about the size of a really good-sized safe, just
essentially solid steel. And it was a very special steel alloy that was
supposed to survive. Well, it didn't. There was very little from that
station.
We had a quite elaborate closure on the front end. There was
a very fine theoretical physicist, Harold Hall, working for Montgom-
ery Johnson in early '58. They were worrying about this containment
problem, and Harold came up with the idea of a Box A type closure,
as they call it now. This was a brand new idea. Harold Hall did some
calculations, and so did Montgomery Johnson, and they said, "Ah,
yes!" So a Box A type closure was used for the first time on Logan,
and it worked very well. I think the front end was a foot in diameter,
which is pretty big. Maybe it was ten inches.
When they were digging back after the shot they also drilled
back at different areas around the zero room, and found that the
really highly radioactive area, I guess you would call it the cavity
today, was pear shaped. It wasn't circular. Some activity had come
down the tunnel, but not very far except for a few cracks that went
out as much as 1 50 feet. So, it did contain completely.
However, it knocked in the side of the drift where Blanca was
supposed to be, and there wasn't time to clean out that drift, so
instead of being shot underneath the mesa where'it was supposed to
be, Blanca was shot beneath the very steep face of the mesa, out
28a
• .* t '
w
:**M&'
V/&WS
&*t''JJl'
October 14, 1958, Neptune event, 116 tons, tunnel U12c.

28b
October 30, 1958, Blanca event, 22 kt, tunnel U12b.

Origins 29
where the overburden was maybe half of what it would have been.
I watched it, and I thought the side of the mountain was going to
come right towards me and hit me. I was only two miles away.
The days of unrestricted atmoshperic testing at the Nevada
Test Site came to an end on October 31, 1958, at midnight. As
midnight came and went ^ Livermore device, ready to be fired, hung
suspended from a balloon, and there it remained until the balloon
was brought down and the device removed.
Duane Sewell, who later became the Deputy Director of the
Livermore Laboratory, was the Scientific Adviser to the Operations
Manager for Hardtack Phase II, and made the recommendation not
to fire.
Sewell: We left one device unfired, and I remember that night
very well. I had about fifteen hundred people who really were upset
with me because I didn't tell the AEC to go ahead and fire that
device. I told them not to fire it, because it was obvious we were
going to have trouble, but not from fallout. The wind pattern was
in a direction that was not going to give us trouble, and that last shot
was a balloon shot, so there was not going to be a great deal of dirt
picked up, and local fallout from that. But the wind pattern was such
that there was a potential for a pressure impulse into Las Vegas that
was strong enough to possibly break plate glass windows. We
obviously didn't want to hurt anybody, and didn't want to break
windows either.
We were testing with shots of a half ton of high explosive
mounted on one of the hills a short distance from the CP. We'd fired
a number of those during the evening, and it was a double bounce.
The shock wave bounced down around Indian Springs, then the next
bounce was into Las Vegas, and it was rather sharply focused. We
had trouble getting enough high explosive; I was blowing up all the
high explosives on the site to make those measurements every half
hour to forty-five minutes. The scheduled deadline was midnight on
October 31 st, Halloween night. I remember a lot of masks around
the place.
Dodd Starbird was the Director of Military Applications at the
time that operation was going on. I got on the phone with him, and
I said, "That's midnight Washington time, not Greenwich time when
we start the moratorium." We agreed on that. That gave us an extra

five or six hours. When it got to that point I said, "No, it's really
midnight here," and I got him to agree to that. Then I tried to get
him to agree to midnight within the United States, which would
mean Hawaii, but he wouldn't buy that. He wouldn't go that far,
so Pacific Standard Time was what we finally had to go on.
We fired the last HE shot about eleven-thirty that night. I was
in the microbarograph room, and we had people out in the field with
mobile measuringsystems. The people there called in and said, "My
God, what did you fire that time?" It really shook them. Appar-
ently we had them just at the focus, and I thought, "Boy, if a half
a ton can be heard that far, I'm not going to fire." The last thing
we wanted was to have any sort of damage, or the potential of
harming people in Las Vegas. That's why I made the decision I did.
I advised Jim Reeves not to fire and he went along with it. That's
why we left that thing hanging on the balloon that night.
Louis Wouters was one of the Livermore scientists waiting for
the shot to be fired.
Wouters: We ended up with one shot, Adams, being The Last,
the last of that particular series. It was going to be shot on October
31 st, but something didn't go the right way, and we didn't fire the
shot. If the politicians had any sense at all they would have let us
shoot it, because it turned out that two days later the Soviets went
ahead and fired one more shot anyway, after the beginning of the
moratorium. They weren't as picky about those things as we were.
31
2
The Rainier Event
The first nuclear detonation that was designed to be completely

contained was the Rainier event, fired in B-tunnel in Rainier Mesa
on September 19,1957, during the Plumbbob operation. It had a
yield of 1.7 kilotons, and for the first time there was a nuclear
detonation that did not release radioactive material into the atmo-
sphere.
During the test moratorium that started in 1958 there were
extensive explorations of the cavity region and the surrounding
materials. It was from the information obtained during these
reentry operations that many of the early ideas of cavity formation,
growth, size, and so forth originated.
Gerry Johnson was, at that time, the Test Director for Livermore
events, and was the person who caused the Rainier detonation to
take place.
Johnson: The operational constraints, which were increasing
each year, were bugging us, and we were looking for a way out.
Then Teller and Griggs did some back of the envelope calculations
and said, "Look, it ought to be possible to shoot a shot under-
ground, and if you had a thousand feet of overburden, you probably
could shoot a few kilotons or so." I was interested in that, and I said,
"Well, we'll examine that. We'll get some people looking at it and
thinking about it, and see what comes out of it." Which we did.
That was in ' 5 7 . The Teller and Griggs suggestion was about
a year previous. They wrote a memo on it, describing the concept.
Two of the big questions we had were whether you could contain it,
and would the radiochemistry be any good. As usual, we got into
big arguments with Los Alamos on all issues from technical to cost.
The chemists here felt they could do the chemistry. We had
questions about the sampling. We didn't know if we'd have a pool
of molten rock, or what we would to get into. Before the event we
had lots of speculation on what would really happen. There were
some calculations made in terms of what you might expect in ground
shock, and surface motion, and so on.
We choose the site based on topography. We decided on a

tunnel geometry because we thought that would be the best way to
do diagnostics. And that's how we finally ended up with Rainier
Mesa. We ended up in tuff, which was good stuff to dig in, but we
didn't know anything about it. We didn't know what tuff was when
it was first mentioned to us.
But then we began to get into public information trouble. A
number of us were interacting with the geophysical community,
which we always had done, for all sorts of reasons. Dave Griggs
made the suggestion, "Look, if you are going to fire a shot like this,
for the first time we'll have a shot closely coupled to the ground.
We'll know the yield, we'll know the coordinates, and we ought to
make this information available to the geophysical world, so they
can take advantage of it. In fact, you ought to announce it ahead
of time."
Well, we went through this, and were told to hold the time of
firing to a tenth of a second at some predetermined time, which we
agreed to do. If for any reason we were delayed, and couldn't meet
that time, we agreed to wait twenty-four hours and try again. And
we published this. That was fine. It was very altruistic and lovely,
and in the right spirit of technical cooperation. But about a month
or six weeks before we were going to be ready, an international
geophysical meeting took place in Toronto, and by then this event
was getting lots of interest on the part of the seismic geophysical
community. At this meeting some guy made some statement about
Livermore planning to fire an "earthquake maker," and it hit the
headlines, and of course got the Atomic Energy Commission's
attention.
Carothers: "AEC TO FIRE EARTHQUAKE BOMB !!!" I can
see the headlines.
Johnson: That's right. Well, that did it. Strauss, who was then
Chairman of the AEC, called and said, "What in the hell are you
guys doing out there?" I said, "Nothing."
So I went in to talk with the Atomic Energy Commission, and
I said, "We've gone through all the calculations of what the seismic
effects might be. This is a very low yield thing that we're trying to
shoot; 1.7 kilotons." That seemed quite small to us. "And we've
done all these calculations." Strauss said, "That's not good enough.
I'll tell you what you've got to do before I'll authorize this shot. You
The Rainier Event 33
have to assure the Commission that tne shot itself will not cause an
earthquake. Number two, that it will not trigger an earthquake, and
number three, if a natural earthquake occurs at the same time, you
have to prove you didn't do it."
So we put together a committee. We got Perry Byeriy,
somebody out of Cal Tech, I guess Dave Griggs was on it, a fellow
named Roland Beers whom none of us knew, and somebody from
back east. They met. And we told them what we were going to do,
and the whole thing, and Byerly's first remark was, "You shouldn't
be so presumptuous. One point seven kilotons? That will do
nothing seismically." 1 said, "I'm not arguing with you."
I called up Strauss an appropriate time later and I said, "We've
gone through this thing. This board of experts got together, now
we want to come in and talk to you." Strauss said, "Who's on that
committee?" I told him, and he said, "I don't want any West Coast
people on it." This was a setback, because the West Coast seismic
mafia was most of it. It turned out that the only guy who was
acceptable to them to be at this presentation was this guy Roland
Beers, whom we didn't know.
Beers came to the meeting. He was a soft-spoken guy, and
didn't seem to know what was going on. I thought, "We've lost the
shot." I muttered to my partners, "I don't think we're going to win
this one. I don't know this guy; he didn'tsay anything when we were
meeting, and I don't know who he is."
So we go assemble with the Commission and have the meeting.
I go through my pitch, describing the experiment and so on, what
we were doing, and what the conclusion of this panel was. Strauss
then looked at Beers and said, "Beers, what do you think is the
largest explosion that you could safely fire in Nevada, under-
ground?" I thought, "Oh God, what's he going to say?" And he
said, so quietly Strauss could barely hear him across this enormous
table, "About a megaton." Strauss said, "What !" Beers said,
"About a megaton, sir." That was all he said, and Strauss said, "You
fellows get out of here. The Commission and I are going into an
executive session." Which they did, and they decided favorably.
"Okay, but be careful."
So off we go, and by then the furor had gotten to the state of
Nevada. The day before the test somebody from the Governor's
office came to the Test Site to serve an injunction on the AEC to
stop the shot. The Governor said, "We'll hold the AEC directly
responsible for any damage to public works in the state of Nevada."
He wasn't going to take any responsibility. Well, bless Jim Reeves,
who was the AEC Area Manager for the Site. The day the guy came
out to serve the summons, Jim had to make extensive surveys of the
upper end of the Test Site. He was unreachable.
Carothers: Well, he was just doing his job. He has to go see
what's going on, once in a while.
Johnson: Sure, he's the Manager. And we were going to fire
the next day.
We had a technical advisory board, with respect to the
containment. These were vulcanologists, geophysicists, I don't
know who all, but distinguished people. The night before the shot
we had a final review. Shall we go ahead, or is there something else
we should do? And the conclusion was everything is fine, go ahead.
We arrived at the CP early in the morning; I forget what time
we were to fire, but it was during daylight so we'd get good
photography. I was there, and one of the members of the advisory
group came up. We were about an hour away from firing. This was
a fellow named Fran Porzel, who was an expert in ground shock, and
shock measurements, and so on. He was from Battelle, in Chicago.
He came up and said, "Gerry, I'm nervous about that tunnel, about
the containment. There are only thirteen feet of sandbags in there."
I said, "Oh yes, we all know that."- He said, "I'm not sure that's
going to hold."
And then he began to pace back and forth. And he kept talking
and walking beside me. He said, "Can't you just hold the shot for
a few days? We'll go back in and put some more sandbags in." 1
said, "How many sandbags would you put in? What would you do?"
and so on. Well, he wasn't sure. I said, "Well, Fran, I'll tell you.
We've worked on this thing for a year. We've had the best advice
we could get, including last night. If we open that tunnel up to do
anything, we have to start over, repeat all our dry runs, and check
everything out again. We'd have to do everything. I don't know
how long it would take us to get it straightened out so we could get
back to a shot day. And this is the end of the operation. We're
holding the operation to get this shot off, and it's an experiment.
We could easily lose the whole thing, administratively, and I don't
want to do that."
He said, "You know if that blows out, everybody here will say
they knew it was going to happen, and it will be your neck that will
be out." I said, "Well, that's my job. But there's just no way that
I can see to postpone. We're committed now. We have to go
ahead." I said, "I appreciate your bringing it up. There really isn't
a choice. If we cancel it now we might not get another crack at it."
But he really put the heat on me.
And of course, as it turned out, it worked perfectly, but that's
just a bit of history, and he could have turned out to be right. But
we had done everything we knew to do. And God knows what would
have happened if we had shut down. I think if we hadn't fired at that
time we probably would not have gone to underground testing. I
think it's unlikely. The next year we entered into the nuclear test
moratorium. We wouldn't have had time to do a test, set it up, and
do enough to learn any more about it.
But we did fire it, and it was well established by the end of the
next year, as a technique. We were lucky in hindsight, as it turns
out. The seal was just a simple spiral. We only had those thirteen
feet of sandbags, and a steel door to stop gases, but the stemming
worked perfectly. We got overconfident later and had some
problems, but Rainier did work very well.
And as it turned out, we recovered the radiochemical samples.
The rock had frozen right away because the cavity collapsed, so we
never did find molten rock. But we were concerned about tapping
into molten rock. The question was, "How can we test that out?"
Naturally we went to the vulcanologists, and they told us that no one
ever drilled into a molten zone. The way they got their samples was
to wait for the molten rock to come to the surface so they could
scoop it out in a bucket.
About that time there was an eruption on Kilauea Iki in which
a pool of lava some three hundred feet deep was formed, and later
a thin crust about a twenty feet or so thick formed. So we sent some
guys from the Lab to drill through the crust and collect samples,
which they did. They only had to drill through twenty feet of stuff,
but to get to a suitable location they had to walk out on this crusty
lava flow for several hundred feet. Don Rawson headed the group
out there. They had a contract driller and crew, but they were with
them. That experience convinced me that at Livermore you could
get somebody to volunteer for anything.
Carothers: Gary, when did you first became involved in the

containment business?
Higgins: It was at the Laboratory, not at the Test Site, and it
was almost coincident with the firing of Rainier. Gerry Johnson,
who was then the Division Leader of the test organization, I think
then called Test Division, was working with Bill Ogle and AI Graves
from Los Alamos, who were deeply involved in the conduct of the
whole Plumbbob operation. Gerry went to Chemistry Division, and
what Gerry wanted was someone to look into the question of how
you would do a radiochemical yield measurement on Rainier, or a
test like Rainier. I was in the radiochemistry group of the Chemistry
Division, and in the heavy elements part of the group. My
responsibility was the separation of the plutonium and transplutonic
elements from the debris samples from the atmospheric shots.
So, 1 came into this picture just about the month Rainier was
fired. I didn't know a thing about what the underground effects of
a nuclear detonation would be, so I thought 1 would go talk to some
experts, who obviously would know. And so I began to talk to
experts at Los Alamos and at Livermore. It turned out that all of
the experts had not come to a consensus. There was a range of
expectations. At one extreme was the prediction, or guess, that
Rainier would produce a bubble of molten rock about a meter in
radius, and that the debris would all be contained in that lava.
Carothers: But Gary, you can just look at the calories available
and know that there will be more molten rock than a few tons.
Higgins: You'd think so. At the other extreme there was the
expectation that there would be something like a 100 meter void,
and the debris would be contained in a thin shell of glass lining that
void. This was about the period of time when the French science
fiction writer, Camille Rougeron, who made his living selling these
Jules Vern type ideas to the popular press, published an article that
said if you detonated a nuclear explosion underground, in rock,
you'd get a glass bubble full of steam, and you could then power
generators with that steam for a very long time. That was before
we'd ever done anything in the Plowshare program.
Carothers: Who were these experts you talked to?
Higgins: Gene Pelsor was the one in Livermore that I particu-

larly remember, because his prediction was, within the uncertainty
of the yield, correct about both the size of the void that would be
produced, and the approximate amount of shock-melted material.
His arithmetic, the details of how he arrived at the numbers were
incorrect, but with self-canceling errors there were enough wrong
things that his conclusions ended up being pretty close to right.
Carothers: If you have enough wrong things some of them will
make the answer too big, and some of them will have the effect of
making it too small, so you might come close to the right answer?
Higgins: Yes. The guys who were really far off were the ones
who made one mistake and got everything else perfectly to maybe
four significant figures.
One of the people who made an estimate was Stanley Ulam, at
Los Alamos, who was a theoretical type person. He made one very
simple mistake, and I'm inferring this from what other people said;
he did not say this to me. His error was to neglect the vaporization
of rock, in that he went directly from a solid to a Fermi gas, and back
to a solid. That neglects the region of condensed molecular gases.
Half the energy of vaporization of rock is in the phase transitions
from solid to vapor. There's another half that takes the rock from
vapor to ionized gas. So, the first half is a very important step
function in the pressure-volume relationship, but it's easy to leave
it out because nothing very important physically is going on except
the change of phase. That was the small estimate.
The very largest estimate came from Bill Libby, and his was not
very different from Gene Pelsor's. The reason it was larger was
because he did not leave any strength in the solid. Gene let the solid
be an elastic solid forever; what Libby did was pretend it was a liquid
with a back pressure, but no strength. The way to say that correctly
is to say he used a Poisson's ratio of 0.5 instead of 0.3, as it really
is. Which is kind of a dumb thing, but that does make the cavity get
bigger.
Carothers: He would have been correct if Rainier had been
fired in water.
Higgins: Yes. It would have been precise in water until the

rebound occurred. Rebound occurs in water too, and it causes a
recompression, so the bubble rings. It oscillates with a period that
is proportional to the depth, which is a kind of restoring force.
Carothers: If the energy from the device wasn't going to melt
much rock, where did they think that energy was going to go?
Higgins: Well, you and I think it's self-evident that there would
be a lot of melt. But, naively, people thought that all of the energy
would go out in the seismic wave. If you fired a kiloton explosion
you'd get a kiloton seismic wave. If the earth were perfectly elastic,
that's what would happen. But it's not perfectly elastic, and that
isn't what happens. It's rather fortunate that only something like
one part in ten to the fourth of the total energy ultimately gets into
the seismic wave as energy.
Dave Griggs, who has passed away, was active in the seismic
community, and was the author of the first paper that made an
absolute calibration of the seismic magnitudes of earthquakes
translated into energy. It was based on the nuclear explosions
carried out in the South Pacific - -1 believe it was the 1954 series.
If the conversion were not so small, the convergence of the waves
at the antipode of the explosion would have been sufficient to cause
an eruption, like a volcano.
That was if all the energy had gone into seismic energy. The
people in the seismic community had calculated that if all the energy
went out around the world and came back into the same place at the
antipode, and none of it were lost, there would be another explo-
sion. It wouldn't be any bigger than the detonation, but if the
energy went out one hundred percent elastically, it would be as big
as - - or a little smaller than - - the original explosion. So all you
would do then, if you wanted to destroy a target, was to go to its
exact seismic antipode, fire off the appropriate energy device, and
say, "Who, me?"
Carothers: That sort of thing sounds like the days of the high
altitude tests, where the thought was that you would detonate a
device at some altitude here, and all the ionized particles would
going running down the magnetic field lines and cover up the
enemy's radar over there.
Higgins: Right. You got it. But the business of the earthquake,
and the elastic world was a real concern. They still compute the
elastic equivalence of earthquake yields as the the absolute magni-
tude. If you take the elastically coupled value for a magnitude six
earthquake, it's way less than one kiloton. And so there was real
concern that one kiloton, if elastically coupled, would be like a
magnitude seven earthquake. A magnitude seven earthquake, it
causes some damage. But the real world is not elastic, which is of
some annoyance to those who like to calculate things, because it
would be much simpler if it were.
By the time Rainier was fired there was a group of consultants
who were assembled, ad hoc at first, and then that group was was
formalized more or less, to advise the AEC, or the Manager of the
Nevada Operations Office, about such matters as safety. Dave
Griggs was on that committee. He got in by being in the seismic
community, and being an A i r Force consultant. He brought George
Kennedy along because George had been a student of George
Morey's, and knew about the melting of rocks and so on.
Carothers: People certainly knew some things about the
response of the earth, because for years and years lots and lots of
people had set off thousands and thousands of explosive charges.
A l l kinds of sizes, and in all kinds of places, and they knew the earth
didn't respond that elastically. So what were these people in such
an uproar about?
Higgins: Well, precisely the same thing that they were in such
an uproar about on things like Three Mile Island. It was the
unknown feature. And the people involved in the Test Program at
that time really weren't in the same community as the people who
had all of this experience with high explosives. There were a few
individuals who carried that experience over. One was a guy named
Roy Goranson, in the very early days at the Laboratory, who had
spent a lot of his life with high pressure steam, and steam explosions,
and equations of state of water and rocks.
Gerry ]ohnson had the experience of working with artillery in
the Navy, and he knew from his experience what the detonation of
a thousand pounds of TNT would do, and how it would scale. He
had HE experiments done prior to Rainier. They tried to produce
containment, and discovered one of the differences between TNT
and nuclear, which is the residual gas.
You can't contain high explosives unless you can also contain
lots of residual gas. For every pound of high explosive, you produce
a pound or so of residual gas. In a nuclear explosion the rock
vaporizes and does all of its mechanical work, then as soon as it cools
off it goes back to be some kind of rock again, and the gas pressure
is gone. So, the containment of the nuclear debris is a much simpler,
although more sophisticated, problem than the containment of a
high explosive charge.
It's really extremely difficult to contain high explosives. People
in oil fields and in mining are painfully aware of that problem. For
that reason they have criteria for safety and for detonations that are
very different from those for the safety and containment of nuclear
explosions. The difference is understood by a few people, but most
people who grow up in one community don't comprehend the
problems that people in the other community face.
People who have grown up thinking nuclear containment
cannot understand why the oil field people want explosives with the
highest possible specific energy with the lowest possible residual
gases - - they're extremely fond of nitroglycerine, for example,
which is terribly hazardous to handle. So you say, "Why don't you
use something like ammonium nitrate? It's a lot safer." And they
say, "Yeah, but we can't get enough in there to shatter the rock."
" But why do you want to shatter the rock? That just makes little tiny
particles, and they'll plug up. What you want are fractures." They
say, "Yeah, but if we do that, it blows out the top of the hole."
"Well, then why don't you stem it?" "Oh, you can't stem it."
They don't shoot stemmed shots. They put the explosive
down, detonate it, and let it blow out. They don't try, because they
have never been successful in containing the gases. Therefore, they
don't use some of the most valuable products of the explosion. The
high pressure gas would do them more benefit than the Shockwave,
but they don't use it.
But, back to the rocks. It was difficult to select which expert
to believe, except I could reject there would be no bubble. All of
them shared one thing; there would be molten rock, and I believed
that. The first conclusion I came to was that it was reasonable from
all points of view to expect the debris to be in fused rock. And if
the molten rock cooled, there would be glass. If it stayed molten,
then the question would be how would you sample it., The obvious
answer was, you would need to drill into it. But, without measuring
we had no idea how complete or how good the samples would be,
or how efficient or effective the sampling would be.
We had some fused rock from the ground surface of a number
of near-surface bursts, including Trinity, so we could do the
chemistry on fused rock. We had done all of those things with
samples picked up from the surface. But we had no idea what
concentration of debris to expect in the samples we hoped to get.
We didn't know whether we were going to need a gram or a
kilogram. And that, of course, depended on how much rock got
melted per kiloton. We did do some sensible estimates, again using
Gene Pelsor's calculations primarily.
I believe Gene was asked to attempt to fully contain the
explosion. Not maybe for the reasons that we want it contained
now, but that was his objective. The stemming procedure on Rainier
had been designed as a rather elaborate spiral buttonhook. The
philosophy, expressed in different ways by different people, was
that the radioactive debris would be charging around the tunnel at
velocity V, and by the time it went around the spiral, the seismic
Shockwave would have come across and closed off the tunnel,
trapping the radioactive debris. The placement of the sandbag plug,
I believe, was to stop jets. The idea that the buttonhook would
achieve containment neglected a lot of things. It worked for all the
wrong reasons, but it worked, that one time at least, very well, and
it established that containment could happen. I believe that a lot
of Gene's work was not recognized as being as good as it was,
considering how little anybody really knew.
Carothers: Somebody wanted to try to contain the shot, and
that was probably Gerry Johnson.
Higgins: Yes. I think it was Gerry, although Al Graves had
made the statement, before this was done, that we weren't going to
be able to continue to carry out atmospheric nuclear tests forever,
and we really ought to find an alternative method. He didn't say it
should be underground, or in deep space, or how. There were
actually four ideas that were kicked around in '56 and '57.
Underground was one, deep space was two, deep ocean was three.
Under the ice cap, either in the Antarctic or under the Greenland
ice cap, was the fourth possible way of carrying out tests without
contaminating the environment in any gross way. We might criticize

the ice cap or the ocean ways as contaminating, but at that time, in
that period, that looked like complete containment.
Well, Rainier was fired. The next thing then was to find
someone who could drill into it. In the fifties a lot of our drilling
was done by contract drillers, and most of the early drilling
underground was by E. ]. Longyear people, and people that they
hired. The Longyear people were having real difficulty, because the
drillers had to be cleared; you had to have a green badge to work
with the radioactive debris in those days. To find drillers that they
could get a long enough history on to get them a Q clearance was
not easy. Drillers, by habit, or choice, or circumstance, don't stay
in one place for very many months at a time. They go from crew
to crew, and place to place, wherever the work is good and their
fancy takes them.
Diamond drillers, who are a group that we found were experi-
enced in the small drills we needed for the underground rigs, were
used to doing ore deposit definition for the mining companies all
over the world. So, most of the drillers we had were non-U.S.
citizens, which made it even harder to get clearances for them. We
had a real problem getting three men to handle each of the three
shifts - - actually it means four shifts because we were going to go
seven days a week.
Finding that number of drillers who were Q-cIeared was really
very difficult. Add to that the gossip that was going back and forth
in the union halls, or in the beer halls maybe, about the possibility
of thousands of pounds per square inch of steam, and such high
radiation that they'd be sterilized forever. One fellow told me he
was told that the samples they would recover, if they ever did get
to where they were supposed to, were going to be so radioactive that
the whole crew on that shift was going to be killed. Well, it makes
it real hard to get people to do that, no matter how much you try
to convince them, or talk about what to expect. And, we weren't
all that sure ourselves. We knew the business about the radioactivity
wasn't true, but beyond that we didn't really know what the
conditions would be when we got there.
Carothers: What was your role on the reentry?
^.
PORTAL t
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0 (0 20
Fset
Preshot tunnel configuration in region of detonation.

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42b
WEST
T0S 6 80' SHAFT ~H

0 20 40
FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL i i
SCALE IN FEET
Geological cross section at Rainier.

Higgins: People didn't have administratively designated roles

in those days. My role was sort of keeping tabs of what was
observed, and reporting it, and asking questions. I talked to the
drillers, and the geologists. We had a geologist by then, and the
Geological Survey was involved. And I did chemistry measure-
ments. A lot of those. 1 still did that part of it.
Our first attempts were to go into the tunnel, establish an
alcove, and drill horizontally. 1 found out drills don't easily do that;
they don't drill horizontally, because the drill stem droops. So,
there was the issue of, well, where is the drill?.
Before we had penetrated the radioactive zone in the tunnel we
had started drilling from the surface, but that was 860 feet up. For
reasons I've never been able to understand, they cored all the way
from the surface instead of just drilling in, and then switching to a
core bit. The communication between ourselves and the construc-
tion people in the field was not good. Perhaps we asked them to core
from the surface, not realizing that they could very easily switch
from a spade bit that would have drilled much faster and have gotten
down to the ground zero zone very early, to a core bit.
However, the hole from the surface never intercepted any of
the radioactive debris because it came out in the chimney, and all
the drilling fluid ran out of the hole. The drillers maintained that
they could not drill without fluid because the drill bits would not
survive if there was no fluid in the hole. In those days they didn't
have reverse circulation drilling. They only had forward circulation,
which meant that the fluid came out behind the bit. So, if there was
nothing around the bit to confine the drilling fluid, it was not cooling
the bit; it was cooling the rock wherever it ran to. We really had to
learn the drilling business before we could ask the right questions,
and we didn't know them then.
I also found out that the progress in drilling in the tunnel was
painfully slow. The drill would be turning around and around for
days on end, but it never got anywhere. I found out the reason that
it wasn't getting anywhere was that the drillers didn't want it to. As
I said, there were rumors, including the one that this cavity might
contain thousands of pounds per square inch of steam.
Carothers: Well, Gary, the drillers felt they were going to drill
into a volcano, filled with radioactive steam and molten rock.
Would you want to drill into something like that, which would spew
all over you and kill you and all of the members of your drill crew?
Higgins: Of course not. So, they would turn the drill, but
they'd never push. We had a huge cavern worn out of the side of
the alcove into the tuff, but it went in only a few feet. I think there
was a lot more gossip and misinformation than we in the Laboratory
ever heard. I do know that there were drillers who would make all
kinds of excuses for not going on that particular drilling crew.
Flangas: Well, there was always some concern over the
unknown, but for those of us who came out of the mining business,
we were used to some risk. Now, there is certainly a difference
between intelligent risk and recklessness, and some of us know the
difference. Gary Higgins became an integral part of that crew, and
I personally had a great deal of confidence in his judgment and his
experience. He didn't try to butt into the actual mechanics of what
we were doing, but he was there to advise us on the things we didn't
know about. It was a very, very close relationship. We trusted him,
and his judgment was good.
Carothers: His story is that it took a long time to drill back into
the cavity, because the drillers weren't very anxious to get there.
Flangas: There may have been some of that - - some of the
miners were that way. Occasionally you would run into somebody
who would be a little bit spooked, but once it was explained to me,
and I had a fairly decent grasp of what to expect, and as long as the
leadership was confident in what they were doing, our people just
followed.
Higgins: Well, finally, after a couple of months of drilling, and
I think it was close to a year after Rainier was fired, because we
didn't start immediately, the drillers penetrated, unexpectedly, a
radioactive zone. That got radioactive debris into the tunnel, and
we had to shut down because the rad-safe people said, "You've
contaminated everything here." It was great news to me, but sad
news to the drillers.
I went down and tried to find some of the debris, along with
some of the people from the NTS-LLL contingent. We finally sorted
out a bunch of sand and stuff, and when we took it all apart a grain
at a time we could find some little black pieces of glass that seemed
to be more radioactive then the rest. It was radioactive enough to
be an annoyance, but not a big enough sample to do any kind of
measurements on. Maybe we could have, but we didn't try. But the
key thing that had happened was that we had penetrated into a
radioactive zone, and there was no high pressure steam in it. Now,
it was hot - - it was hot enough so if they shut off the circulation
water it would almost boil. The water that was coming out was too
hot to hold your hand in. But the drillers then had great confidence
it wasn't going to erupt, and so, within the next two weeks they
finally hit a mass of lava. It was black frothy rock, and they got cores
of it.
We found a piece of core that was gray and gunky, but it had
a radioactive peak in it. And I said, "I wonder why that is?" So,
I put a rubber glove on and squished it. I found little glass beads that
were pendant shaped. From the shape, and the fact that it was now
solid glass, we could infer that it had been hanging from something
at some time. We said, "If it was hanging from something, it must
have been in a void space. It was liquid, and it has the shape of a
liquid drop, so there couldn't have been anything against it."
And so we began to reconstruct that after the cavity had grown
underground it had stood there for a little while - - at least long
enough for these glass beads to solidify. By a process of reconstruc-
tion we worked out about how long that had to have been. We
confirmed that by measuring the ratio of some of the gas-precursed
radioisotopes that were included in those glass pendants to what
they were in unfractionated radioactive debris. It worked out that
it was something between one and a half and four minutes that this
glass had been pseudostable. The whole thing stood there before
the roof caved in.
We also looked at the amount of water that was dissolved in the
glass. Roy Goranson had produced a table, and published it back
in the thirties, of the solubility of steam in silica glass. If you
quenched a glass in water at ten bars of pressure, what percent of
that glass would be water, and how much water would remain as
vapor? He had the whole table of solubility of water in silica glass,
and we got the pressure of the Rainier cavity as being about 45 bars.
We observed that 45 bars was not all that different from the
overburden pressure, at that depth of burst. If one hypothesizes
that the steam expands until it's in equilibrium with the external
pressure, then all of the pieces balance. So, that became an adopted
hypothesis for containment; that the cavity size is such that the
pressure would equal the overburden pressure. It turns out that's
probably not right, exactly, but it was a good working hypothesis.
We now say stress instead of pressure, and it is probably even
correct.
The Rainier cavity was about fifty-five or fifty-six feet in radius.
That was the size it would have been if the material in the first meter
or so, around the explosion, were transformed into steam and other
gases, and they expanded until the pressure was somewhere near the
overburden pressure. That was the concept of a balloon, or bubble,
blowing up inside a pile of blocks, with no rock strength involved,
and that was pretty much what the model was that was used for a
lot of the early evaluations of containment. It's wrong, and it's
wrong in a lot of different ways, but it was extremely useful.
About a year or so after Rainier the Hardtack II series started,
and we sampled several other underground shots - - Logan, Blanca,
Evans, Neptune. We did not explore, in any detail, any of those
shots. We simply drilled enough to get rad-chem samples. We were
still going into the tunnel and drilling horizontally.
Carothers: When you were drilling horizontally, were you then
getting your samples from the bottom of the cavity, or from the
sides?
Higgins: They came from the bottom of the cavity. From what
we discovered on Rainier we designed the scaling law that says the
radius of the cavity is 55 times W to the 1/3 feet, with.W, the yield,
in kilotons. That was where we found the puddle that gave us a
good, big sample. So, the target we drilled for was based on design
yield and 55 times W to the 1/3 feet. We usually aimed a little
above that, with the idea that if we missed it on the high side, as the
drill progressed across the cavity it would go through the puddle on
the far side. And we would carefully log, and almost always saw two
blips on the radioactivity versus depth of penetration plot. And we
then said, "That's the cavity boundary." And on the far side we'd
say, "Well, the drill probably carried some radioactivity along with
it, so the far side is probably a little too far." So you subtract a little
from that, and do things like that.
Those measurements were recorded, of course, and people

began to say, " M y , isn't this interesting that these things scale
together?" Then they said, "What is the yield that you get from the
cavity radius by using the 55 W to the 1 /3 feet law backwards?" It
wasn't very good, but it was a number.
We went through Plumbbob and Hardtack II without really
understanding anything about containment. After Hardtack there
was the moratorium, and during that time we did the post-shot
exploration of Rainier, in great detail. That was to measure
accurately the boundaries of the chimney region and the cavity
region, and all of the physical parameters of the shot. We wanted
to measure things like the temperature, integrate the thermal
energy, and locate where all of the energy was deposited perma-
nently. We balanced the total release, as we measured it from the
rad-chem yield, to the thermal energy to within about 92 percent
or so. We inferred that the energy that went into producing
fractures, which we couldn't measure, was in addition to that. The
seismic energy then was some number that was very small, which
from measuring the seismic wave you could also say was true. So,
in a sense, we balanced the total energy of the shot to within the
precision of the various measurements. Which is a satisfying thing
for scientists to do.
We began to understand, in the course of those drillings, where
the radioactive debris was distributed. Not only the kind we wanted
for the rad-chem samples, but also there were, in these logs of
radioactivity versus distance, blips that were clearly at larger radii
than the inferred cavity radius.
Carothers: You did find cavity material at some distance from
the cavity boundary? Did that material go along bedding planes, or
did you think there were fractures in the rock itself?
Higgins: Well, we didn't recognize bedding planes then. We
did recognize faults. And there was a huge fault not far from the
Rainier shot point. At the time that the tunnel was mined some drift
in the B tunnel complex - - I believe it was 12B-02 - - was
terminated. It was designed to go into the mountain a little further
than it did, but it ran into this fault that was so large that you could
look down it. You could literally bend over and look in, and here
was this hole in the mountain that went off in the distance and you
couldn't see how far it went. It was a real fault, not like the things
we map these days; it was empty. What we did was back up from
this big open fault and mine the buttonhook, and they put the muck
from the ground zero room down into the fault. And it just
disappeared down there. We didn't have to haul it out to the portal
of the tunnel. That was a big fault.
The reason 1 bring the fault up is that in the post-shot
exploration that we did in such detail, we found that the center of
all of the energy, both the radioactive radius from ground zero, and
the thermal regime, was displaced by a couple of meters toward the
fault. It was clear that the presence of that fault influenced the
growth of the cavity, and there wasn't real symmetry. One would
like to say everything was symmetric about the detonation point,
but it really wasn't.
We also found that if you looked in detail, this cavity that we
were fond of drawing with a compass as a nice sphere really had
bumps and wiggles, and had cracks that went out. Some of those
cracks were filled with various and sundry bits of what had been
molten rock. We also found evidence of enough hot vapor having
gone out into some of the fractures to change the color of the rock
on each side of the fracture. It had boiled water out of the rock, but
there was no melt there. So, we knew that the simple picture of a
glass lined sphere, like a Japanese fishing float, the kind you see
hung in the seafood restaurants, really wasn't what the inside of the
cavity looked like. It was really pretty bumpy and wiggly, and
probably very leaky.
When we had the first core holes we saw the blip on each side
of where the cavity was, but when we mined that out we found a
jumble of slabs. They were mostly planar slabs of melt-covered
rocks, folded over each other. When the geologist identified where
these slabs had come from, it turned out they had come from a
hundred or so meters above the detonation point. Then we began
to have a picture that there was the growth of the cavity, then a
pseudo-stable period when it sat there and nothing happened except
some leaking of the high pressure gases pushing out, and then slabs
and bits and pieces falling in, jumbling in helter-skelter, and the
steam being quenched by pieces that were fairly large. It was not
a hail of small pieces of sand, but pretty big pieces that were falling
in, and the steam probably migrated some distance upward. In fact
we found evidence for some gas radioactivities in the rubble three
or four cavity radii above the detonation point.
Carothers: This picture you're giving of these slabs of material

falling in doesn't fit very well with the accepted picture of a collapse.
"The geophones were quiet, and then it collapsed, and the collapse
progressed upward at whatever feet per second." It's not exactly
a plug falling in, but it occurs very rapidly, and the picture is that
the layers of rock would still be basically intact, just displaced down
some distance. You don't describe anything like that.
Higgins: No. That's right. What we observed, and I would say
in an almost differential sense, was quite different from what we
inferred from the readings on the instruments. And I see still a
discrepancy between the detailed reentry mining observations from
Rainier, and from the general picture we get from the observations
of cables breaking and from the surface. I think that discrepancy still
exists to a degree. And you identify it very specifically.
I would put this point up, and it's one that has disturbed me and
continues to disturb me. We have only investigated in great detail
one event, and that's Rainier. We've never investigated in great
detail any other one event. In the first place it's quite costly. It cost
us about as much to do the kind of post-shot investigation that we
did on Rainier as it did to fire the shot in the first place. So, it like
doubled the cost.
Now, I must say that in recent years the Iine-of-sight pipe
tunnel explorations have in some respects exceeded the information
that was learned from Rainier. But it is not so much about the
containment of the shot as about the containment of the pipe, and
the phenomena associated with the pipe closure. When I said we've
never explored another shot in such detail, I meant in all the
containment aspects in general. In other, detailed areas, I think
DNA has exceeded Rainier by quite a bit.
Carothers: Well, you had the moratorium going for you, Gary.
People didn't have anything else to do. We wanted to keep the
miners busy, we wanted to keep Gary Higgins busy, and so we let
them go dig around in the mountain.
Higgins: Precisely. And keeping the miners occupied was a
very important thing. During the moratorium a number of profes-
sional people decided to abandon the Test Program. That disturbed
a lot of people who felt an obligation to maintain the defense
posture that we had because of our nuclear weapons capability.
And so they asked themselves, "How far can this loss of personnel
go before we lose the capability to resume, should we decide to
resume?"
There were a number of answers to the question, but among
the answers that emerged was the fact that there were other skills
than physics and mathematics and chemistry that we would be
losing, and one of those was our mining capability and our drilling
capability. Both of those skills had evolved well beyond, and
different from, the common industrial practice. In other words, any
miner wasn't adequate. Or any driller. Witness the fact that we'd
sat there and turned to the right with no forward progress on that
first Rainier hole for two months or so. It was a question of having
other kind of skills that were as important as the scientific skills.
So, during the moratorium, we spent a lot of effort trying to
understand what had happened in the Rainier cavity. The business
of what goes on in a cavity went through a history like that in a lot
of technical fields. There was the first evaluation, and a simple
model was generated, or invented, or selected from among a lot of
proposals. That model fit a lot of observations, so we said, "Okay,
we understand this part of the explosion phenomenology. We won't
devote much time to doing a lot more investigations, because they
are very difficult to do."
And they are difficult because the stress levels within the area
where the cavity is formed run not just to kilobars, but to megabars
and above. So, the measurement techniques must be very sophis-
ticated. The region that's involved is small, and things are diverging
very rapidly in space, so any measurement instrument has to be kind
of tiny. And everything goes on in extremely short periods of time,
so getting signals that are meaningful out from that region is
extremely difficult. Getting a fast signal out means a big co-ax, and
a big co-ax means a big void or something like that in the very small
region. That is kind of contradictory to the idea of measuring what
is happening in that region without disturbing it. There are a lot of
contradictory requirements, or conflicting requirements, when you
try to make such measurements.
Carothers: In your work on Rainier there were probably
several things you wanted to do. Certainly you wanted to do
radiochemical analyses to get the yield. What effort was devoted to
trying to understand what happened to the rock materials them-

selves under the high pressures and high temperatures that had
existed?
Higgins: The primary charge we had was to be able to do on
underground shots the same measurements we'd been doing in
atmospheric testing. So, that was the primary purpose of our
efforts. In order to fulfill that primary objective we wanted to know
something about the mechanics, and the chemistry, of how the
samples we were recovering had been created. The basic purpose
was still to diagnose the performance of the explosive, not to know
how to contain it. The containment concern really didn't come up
until much later.
We were extremely curious about what had happened to the
native material, and we did a lot of different measurements. One
of the first things we found on Rainier was a lot of glass, which was
the tuff that had been melted and then quenched. We did
radiochemical analyses for a lot of different chemical species to
determine how much total rock had been melted, and how well
mixed that melted rock was with the device components themselves.
Those conditions influenced how the device components would
behave after the shot, and what they would be like when we went
back and found the samples. We pretty well knew, from all kinds
of laboratory and atmospheric test experience, what the immediate
surroundings were going to be, and what temperatures and pres-
sures things were going to be heated to. It wasn't like working in
total darkness. We knew that the initial temperatures and pressures
were going to be so high that the material present would be
disassociated into electrons and nuclei, and that there really wouldn't
be any material properties, other than those of a so-called Fermi gas.
Carothers: That doesn't last long.

Higgins: It doesn't last even a microsecond. Some reports on
containment describe what's going on in the first microsecond as if
that's a very short time. That's a long, long time compared to some
of the things that go on. The Fermi gas very quickly, in the first
tenth of a microsecond, probably has begun to expand enough so a
genuine shock has developed. That shock is a really strong shock,
well above a megabar. The rock is vaporized by it, and even though
the gas may not be fully ionized, it's still partly ionized, at least once
or twice, so the chemistry's still not important.
Somewhere out about a meter or two meters from one kiloton

enough energy has been absorbed, and there's been enough spheri-
cal divergence of the shock wave so the pressure level has gone down
to where the kind of rock that's there is important. In the model,
that first simple minded model, what we used to do was say, "Okay,
the first meter that surrounds the explosion is made out of iron."
We had a fairly good equation of state for iron, and we knew what
pressures would be developed if you shocked iron to ten megabars.
So, we started all our calculations, whether the detonation was in
limestone, or oil shale, or Nevada tuff, or alluvium, with iron out
to the first meter. We put the whole energy of the explosion into
that. Of course, if you do that, for most of the explosives we talk
about that means the composition of the explosive itself doesn't
really make a lot of difference.
A sphere of iron with a one meter radius is like ten times pi
tons, so you've got thirty or forty tons of iron to mix with the
device. You mix in a small number of pounds of whatever and it
doesn't make a lot of difference. So, that assumption was very
useful for generating the correct shock out in the rock where we
could make decent measurements and the coaxial cables didn't get
banged so quick that we couldn't get the signals out. They
confirmed that what we'd done by putting in the meter of iron was
right. So, okay, what was in that first meter didn't make any
difference.
All of that model is correct, except that after the material has
been shocked, it does something. It's left behind as very high
pressure atoms and electrons, but it doesn't stay that way. The
electrons and atoms that have been disassociated by the shock, and
other things, are going to recombine, and they don't really care
what form they were in before they were disassociated. They go
back to a form that is consistent with their environment at the time
they are being born. The electrons don't care that they were in tuff
to start with; they're very happy going back and becoming methane,
for instance.
The little bubbles that were frozen inside the glass on Rainier
were microsamples of the cosmos in which they were formed. You
don't know in the stage of expansion when that glass becomes solid
and the bubbles were trapped, but you do know that whenever it did
get solid, it was a closed sample. So, the analysis of those glass
samples showed us a number of things.
We took the glass, broke it into little chips, and examined them
under the microscope to find which had closed bubbles. We put
those in a vacuum system, heated them, and when the glass melted
the bubbles burst, and then we analyzed what the bubbles con-
tained. It turned out that what was in them was mostly water vapor,
which, I would say, was not surprising.
Carothers: You refer to the material you recover from the
cavity as "glass." Why do you call it that? It doesn't look like glass.
Higgins: No, it doesn't look like what we think of as glass, but
in fact it is glass. We had established that early through some work
with consultants at the Laboratory, in several ways. One was to take
some of the initial material we had recovered from Rainier, and do
physical measurements on it; measure its density, its index of
refraction, and so on.
When you look at it through a low power microscope, it is just
like window glass. The reason, when we look at it in a gross sense,
that it is all black is that it has a whole range of size of tiny bubbules
in it that absorb all the wave lengths of light. Plus there are some
inclusions of metals, and other things. If you look at it in a thin
section it doesn't look black any more. First, it looks sort of dark
green. As you get it thinner it begins to look yellow, and then when
you get it down very thin it's perfectly transparent. You can see
through it, with the individual bubbles in it visible. Those bubbles
are remnants of the steam that was in excess of that required for
saturation.
Professor George Morey of the United States Geological
Survey, who was then in his late seventies or early eighties, was
intrigued with the whole of the phenomenology of the creation of
lava. He had worked for many years as a geochemist, first in the
Geologic Survey, and then after his retirement, at the Carnegie
Institute. Then, when they forced him to retire, he went back as
Emeritus Scientist for the USGS.
He was very intrigued with the geochemical processes that go
on in ground water, and how hot water around volcanos and
fumaroles really transports earth from place to place at a very large
rate - - a lot larger than we mortals, who are here for an instant in
geologic time, realize. If that water is flowing from there to here,
it's also bringing along huge quantities of rock. And pretty soon,
as the water evaporates and goes away, the rock will grow here, and
it will grow in whatever form best fits this environment. Professor

Morey spent the last twenty years of his retirement searching out
and quantifying these effects.
Well, what was going on in Rainier, and the underground
explosions in general, was a rapid speeding up all the processes he
was interested in. So, he was intrigued by the kind of glass we would
form from an ash. Volcanic tuff was spewed out of the ground as
ash. But on Rainier it had recondensed, after the shot, as glass. Why
did it come out to be glass, and not go back to being ash? So he got
involved in this study of the glass.
One of his students, George Kennedy, from the UCLA Insti-
tute of Geophysics, also got involved. And there was another
fellow, named David Griggs, who had been involved in the test
program from before Hiroshima and Nagasaki He was the principal
geoscientist involved with the Air Force advisory panel. Professor
Morey, George Kennedy, and Dave Griggs were involved in not only
determining that glass was produced from the condensation of the
molten rock, but also in measuring its index of refraction, and the
amount of water vapor that was dissolved in it. From that, and the
radius of the cavity, we deduced what the steam pressure must have
been to make that kind of glass.
To form glass you need some silica sand. As long as the ratio
of silica to the other common earth forming oxides, such as
aluminum and calcium and magnesium, is large, the melt when
cooled quickly from its liquid state, or quenched, will always form
glass. The rate at which that glass changes back to being crystal
silica, and alumina, and calcium, depends on how much silica there
is. The more silica the longer it will stay glass, but it will change.
That process of changing from glass to crystalline form is devitrifi-
cation.
Glass is a metastable liquid, but it takes a long time to devitrify,
and for silica glasses that time is measured in hundreds of thousands
of years. At the concentration of silica in the tuffs at the Nevada
Test Site, the glass would prefer to be crystalline quartz plus
felspars, but the process takes around five hundred thousand to a
million years. Those tuffs, as we know from many lead isotope ratio
studies, and the fact that they're there as minerals and not as glass
today, are like two, three, four, up to tens of millions of years old.
Even so, there are still remnant glasses from the original volcanic
outpouring. Not a lot, but there are some.
A nuclear explosion converts the rock close around it to glass,
with minor, minor exceptions. And so the generic term is that the
"glass" is the initially molten material, from the shot, that cooled
very quickly. The amount of glass produced is like a kiloton per
kiloton of yield, and that's not too surprising. The energy in the
nuclear explosion is just about right so one kiloton of energy will
make one kiloton of molten rock. And that's what we find out.
Going back to what goes on the cavity, the other thing we
found in those little bubbles in the glass was hydrogen, and oxygen,
and a little bit of carbon monoxide, and a little bit of carbon dioxide.
There really isn't much carbon in the tuff; there wasn't in the Rainier
ground zero area. But, the timbers that held up the tunnel were
wood, and all the electronics had rubber and plastic insulation, and
plastic foam as a dielectric. If you added it all up, there was enough
carbon in the environment to explain the carbon dioxide in the
bubbles.
Now, how did the carbon get from plastic to carbon dioxide?
Well, if you have this big sea of electrons and atoms, the atom
doesn't know whether it came from plastic or rock. A lot of what's
around is water, which is hydrogen and oxygen. So, the carbon has
a high probability of combining with either oxygen, or even more
probably with hydrogen, because there are two hydrogens for every
oxygen, so hydrogen is the major material around. So, when you
put hydrogen with carbon, you get methane. The carbons have
some affinity for each other, so a lot of them go around as two's.
And when two's go together, then you get ethane. Sometimes
there's an oxygen, so that makes methyl alcohol, or methyl
formaldahyde. A whole suite of hydrocarbons gets formed, not
because they were there as hydrocarbons to begin with, but because
it's probable that they're going to become that in this sea of mostly
oxygen and hydrogen with the occasional carbon.
More frequently than carbon there's a silicon, or an aluminum
here and there, but not many. For every four oxygens there's one
aluminum, or iron, or silicon. So they go back together, and then
as they cool they continue to react with each other. One of the
things that Russ Duff has noted, and I think he is onto a very
important clue, is that what is happening in the cavity, even at long

times, like months, is that these gases are finding each other and
reacting.
A not very probable reaction, but an easy example, is where a
methane finds a water molecule, a steam molecule, and reacts with
it. The oxygen from the water will go with the carbon in the
methane, and two hydrogens will get formed. This happens at only
very, very high temperatures; as the temperature cools, that
reaction goes the other way. Water and methane are the natural
products, hydrogen and carbon monoxide are the starting reactants.
That particular reaction occurs at high temperatures, but stops
abruptly at like 1 300 degrees centigrade.
If you analyze a lot of these products, you can look at the ratios
of the chemical compounds and derive a temperature where they
must have been "frozen." They call it "frozen equilibrium,"
because the rates of reaction are exponential. There's an old rule
of thumb which we chemists use, which is not quite accurate, but it
demonstrates the principle: for each ten degrees increase in tem-
perature, you double the rate of reaction. So, it doesn't take a very
big change in temperature to have a reaction proceed extremely
rapidly, as in seconds or milliseconds, or extremely slowly, as in
hours or days. That change can take place as the temperature
changes a hundred degrees or so.
The simplest ratio that gives a temperature is the carbon
monoxide to carbon dioxide ratio at a given pressure of oxygen and
hydrogen. If you look at the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen to water,
that gives another method of calculating a temperature. If those two
temperatures disagree, then you have a phenomenon you have to
explain. It turns out they don't usually disagree, and they haven't
in the tests where we have made measurements. They all give a
temperature which is consistent with the cavity sample that we had
frozen out in the bubbles on Rainier, which was about 900 to a
1000 degrees centigrade. That also turns out to be about where the
melting, or softening point of the rock is. So, all of this holds
together, sort of.
In retrospect it's what we should have expected, but we still
tend to treat the material that the Shockwave traverses near the
explosion as if it were iron, or rock, or aluminum, or plastic. We
forget that the world, and the environment around the explosion,
if you average all the stuff together, is almost half water. Normal
tuff, they say, is fifteen percent water, twenty percent water. That's
by weight. The molecular weight of water is eighteen. The
molecular weight of rock is like sixty or seventy. So, if you take
twenty percent of something with a molecular weight of eighteen,
and mix it with eighty percent of something with a molecular weight
of seventy, the result is that there are more molecules of water than
molecules of rock. And so, if something is going to react, the odds
are just about even that it is going to react with something from
water, and something from rock. So, anything that's going to
happen is dominated by the water.
One thing we found on Rainier was some fragments of glass that
were formed by having been blown down a fracture, which then
squished off. We found such a fracture, and again we didn't
recognize its importance. We had this model of a smooth, round
cavity with a glass lining; we ignored the fact that at two and a half
cavity radii was a fracture containing some glass.
We found this fracture, and said, "Isn't that interesting? 1
wonder how that glass got down there. Well, it must have been a
fracture." A n d , everybody said, "Yes, it must have been a
fracture." But in all of the literature you don't find mention of the
glass-lined cavity having spikes radiating out from it, containing
products from the center. In the model we mentally smoothed the
ball off, and forgot that there were fractures from it.
The point was that in those fractures were glass fragments that
were frozen out while probably it was still in contact with the cavity,
and they had elemental iron, elemental copper, elemental uranium
in them. These metals are extremely reactive. With this sea of
oxygen atoms we should have said, "They shouldn't be there." But
they were there. Again, we ignored that. It was the exception that
should have said our general model was too gross. Chemically, a sea
of electrons is about the most reducing thing there can be. In fact,
you couldn't get the average chemist to comprehend what a mole
of electrons, just electrons, would do.
So, the clues were there. When the cavity forms dynamically,
this high stress Shockwave goes out, running way ahead of the
material. And we know, for example, that shock velocity is greater
than particle velocity, almost no matter how high the stress level of
the Shockwave is. So, as the shock goes out from the explosion
center, it runs ahead of the material, but the material that is behind
it is moving at still a pretty high velocity. The Shockwave is
irreversible; it leaves a portion of its energy behind as heat, which
causes this ionization-disassociation that's going on. There are more
electrons around than anything else, so everything wants to be
reduced to the elemental state, and then start combining. Mos(t of
the atoms that are present are oxygen, so most things end up as
oxides. It may sound contradictory to say that oxides are reduced,
but carbon monoxide is the reduced form, relative to carbon
dioxide, and elemental carbon, or graphite, or diamond, is even
more reduced.
So, the state of the cavity is highly reducing, and so, for
example, if there is copper around the copper will stay pretty much
as elemental copper. You don't see big globs of it because it's all
vapor, and when it condenses, it condenses a few atoms at a time,
dispersed throughout the glass. The black color of the glass is not
due to radiation, and it's not due to carbon; it's mostly due to
elemental lead and iron in the form of single, or a few, atoms.
What we should have learned, and should have known from the
Rainier fractures is that there was a period of time when the cavity
was growing, the boundaries were open, fractures were going out,
and the volume being interacted with was considerably larger than
that which we found when we calculated the steam pressure, and
calculated 50, or 55, W to the 1 /3rd as the cavity radius.
59
3
The Moratorium and the Return to Testing
The 1958-1961 moratorium followed Hardtack II. During the

moratorium Los Alamos drilled some stockpile holes in Yucca, and
Livermore continued with excavations in B tunnel and E tunnel, in
Rainier Mesa. Considerable reentry work and explorations were
done at the site of the Rainier event. And, little known until many
years later, a series of experiments took place which contributed to
the knowledge about containment.
Brownlee: There was something that went on during the
moratorium which used to be supersecret but isn't anymore. There
have been announcements about it, and newspaper stories. That
was a series of one-point kind of experiments, and so we had a rather
active underground experimental program here at Los Alamos. You
didn't see towers, and you didn't see smoke, and you didn't see a
lot of things. But out in TA-49 we put things down holes, and fired
them.
The yields were just the high explosive yield, essentially, but it
was during that period I saw my first stemming collapses, from a
whole series of those things. It always happened. We'd shoot one
of these things off, and a little while later the stemming would fall
down the hole. We were doing them in tuff, so the holes tended to
stand, and the stemming would go down. So, it was during the
moratorium that I began to appreciate chimneys, and stemming
falls.
Bob Newman and I spent an appreciable time fussing about
scaling laws. How big a cavity would we make? How much
stemming did we have to have to keep everything contained? The
difficulty was that the number of people who knew about that
program in Los Alamos was minimal. In J Division there was
Westerfelt, Newman, Campbell, and a few others, including myself.
And of course, in W Division there were the people who were
making the devices.
Because of these experiments I continued to get an education
in containment during the moratorium, which if you stop to think
about it is odd. But it was kept so close that only Campbell and
Newman would talk to me, and they didn't talk to many others at
all. I was not allowed to know very many details. The part of it that
I knew was that we were doing things that required stemming and
containment, and we didn't dare make a mistake. It had to be
contained, and we had therefore to be super-conservative. It wasn't
like the Test Site. If something floats around here in Los Alamos,
everybody in town knows it. There's no way you can escape it. The
argument was that we didn't dare go to the Test Site. I thought that
was a bit odd, but that was my understanding. We had to do it here
because the Russians would know we were doing something if we
went somewhere else.
So, at Los Alamos we were learning a little something about
underground containment. We talked a lot about scaling laws. We
debated whether we needed a depth of burial where there wouldn't
be a crater, or what it was we did need. My recollection is we kept
debating what it meant, but with people like Campbell in the works
those kinds of subtleties were ofttimes scorned. Obviously what we
meant was that nothing comes out. So, at those very early times we
had already, in a way, defined containment as not one atom out.
There was nobody who told us to do it that way.
The scaling laws you could find in the literature were, of
course, for chemical explosions, which is actually what we were
dealing with, in a practical sense. So they were relevant, in a way.
As a result of all that we came to '61 with the conviction that 400
feet times the 1 /3rd power of the yield in kilotons was conservative,
and worked.
In summary, I would say that more happened during that
moratorium that's relevant to containment than you might think.
Even though it was hidden, and there weren't very many people
involved, there was a continuation of thought. I think we were more
ready to test underground than people remember.
There were other activities, at the Test Site, which contributed
to the ability to resume testing, should the need arise. Interestingly
enough, this effort, on the part of both Laboratories, went into the
preparation of underground sites, although the Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty was still several years in the future.
The Moritorium and the Return to Testing 61
Carothers: During the moratorium Livermore had the LRL-

Nevada people working at the Test Site. They got some amounts
of money, and I presume the Los Alamos testing organization did
too. The Livermore people were digging tunnels against the time
when there might be something to do with them. What were the Los
Alamos people doing?
Brownlee: We stockpiled some vertical holes. When the
moratorium was over we had holes in which we could shoot, right
away. We had made the decision early on, I think, that our vertical
holes would take a 48-inch diameter casing. To my memory they
were all drilled to accommodate such a casing.
We were in alluvium in Area 3, and the alluvium we saw was
pretty loose. When we drilled a hole, there were layers of what I
call hourglass sand - - it would flow like the sand in an hourglass.
Any fool knew that you would have to case those holes, or they
would just fill up, particularly if they were going to stand there for
a long time. And so, there was a policy here that you had to shoot
in a cased hole, because you would lose the bomb and everything
else if you didn't. After we resumed testing we used to have that
argument with Livermore, regularly.
Carothers: Well, Livermore shot in cased holes for some years.
It didn't occur to anybody to ask, "Los Alamos drills holes and cases
them. Why do they do that? We're in a different area. Is it the
same? Should we do that?" So, Livermore cased holes. Why? Well,
because Los Alamos did, and that's the way it was done. I think that
is an interesting example of something being done in one place in
one way for a particular reason, and that becomes dogma. In
different place at a different time the same things are done without
regard to the fact that it is different place, and other ways might be
better.
Brownlee: That's right. Had we started up on Pahute mesa, for
example, the dogma would have been utterly different, I think. In
Area 3 we did have the sand flow. In one of the shafts we put down
later, the hourglass sand trickled down between the boards of the
lagging for three or four months. It was a steady little stream, just
like an hourglass. I don't think Livermore has ever seen anything
like that in the north part of the valley.
Roy Miller was the drilling superintendent for Livermore for

many years, and had a different view.
Miller: The problems that LASL had, and we had, on several
holes, was that the alluvium-tuff contact is where they tended to
cave in. There are places where that sand zone acts like a fluid. It
just pours in there like sand in an hourglass.
We have the same zone, only it's deeper than in the Los Alamo
area. As you get up in the northern part of Yucca Flat, we've had
dozens of holes that caved in at the alluvium-tuff contact. We've
repaired a bunch of them and used them; filled them full of cement
and drilled back through.
To give you an example of how massive those cave-ins are,
there was a hole called lOr, back when we were drilling with air-
foam direct circulation. We drilled the hole to 1600 feet, pulled
the drilling assembly out of the hole, ran a caliper log all the way to
the bottom, 1600 feet, and were logging up. When the caliper log
was at about 400 feet - - you run the caliper log from the bottom
up - - it was like an explosion had occurred. Air roared out of the
hole like a volcano. I wasn't there, but the stories that were told
about t h a t . . . It broke all the arms off the caliper log, but they
pulled it on out. Didn't lose it. They repaired the caliper log, and
went back in to 1050 feet, so they had lost 600 feet of hole. This
was a sixty-four inch hole, and essentially this was instantaneous.
They ran the bit back in, cleaned it out without difficulty, all the way
to 1650. Then we pulled the bit out, went back in with the caliper
log, and it stopped at 1050. It did that two more times.
It was that hourglass sand that LASL keeps talking about. The
first time it was a massive cave-in. The other two times it was very
slow. They weren't aware it happened until they went back in. The
same thing happened in Area 2 on the west side of the road. We
drilled down to below the water table, and set a liner to have a dry
hole. It caved in above the liner and filled the liner up. We went
in, cemented it up, drilled back down, and fortunately hit the liner.
Anyway, those formations that LASL talk about down there occur
up in Area 2 and 10, only at a deeper depth.
Brownlee: I think we did cased holes in Area 3 for perfectly
rational reasons, in light of the things we were seeing. It was only
after we had this big quarrel with Livermore, some years later, after
they went to uncased holes and were pointing fingers at us for

spending too much money casing holes, that we really examined the
fact that even in the alluvium in Area 3 the holes lasted a long time
if you didn't mess around in them. That was very hard for Campbell
to accept.
Also, during the moratorium, there was a doctrine to keep the
testing community intact.
Carothers: You might almost call it a readiness program.
Brownlee: Yes, you might. And the way they planned to keep
it intact was to let people work on whatever they wanted to. We had
said, before the moratorium, that during the moratorium we would
rework and reduce all the data we had collected in those frantic
years of tests. In fact that really didn't happen. There were a few
people who worked on data, but there were people they didn't want
to lose who didn't want to work on data. They were allowed to work
on other things, so in truth, even though people were around, they
had other interests and evolved to other programs.
And so, when the moratorium was over and we went back to
testing in ' 6 1 , we really had, it's fair to say, a different set of people.
Not entirely of course, but there were different groupings of
people, and so there was not a lot of carryover from the things we
did in '57 and '58, as far as containment was concerned, into the
'61 time-frame.
Louis Wouters, by 1958, was one of the senior scientists in the
Livermore testing program. He remained with the program until his
retirement. As with the comments of John Foster cited after, his
remarks do not have to do with containment, but they are interesting
to consider in the light of Bob Brownlee's words about maintaining
a testing, or containment capability when there is nothing to test, or
to contain.
Wouters: The day the moratorium started, L Division ceased
to exist in the minds of management. What do we need these people
for? We have no tests to shoot. The general attitude we lived with
for almost a year was, "Well, we're paying them, aren't they happy
with that? We haven't fired them, after all. Good God, what are
they complaining about? They haven't got anything to do except
plan, and think, and look a old data. That seems to us that is an an
idyllic situation." Well, the kind of guys we had at that time in Test
Division were a bit more motivated and a bit more ambitious than
that, ambitious in the technical sense. They wanted to go out and
do things. They were young men, and they wanted to do things.
They didn't like being cooped up in an office.
The first year there were a number of things to clean up. There
was data from Hardtack II, and also Hardtack 1, to get into some kind
of shape. Only about half of that work actually got done, because
there was no interest from the design divisions, none whatever.
1 think it was in 1959 that 1 went over to England to look into
a number of things connected with the Joint Working Group we had
with them, and also go to one of the photomultiplier plants of EMI
to see what they had to offer. The people at AWRE were very nice,
and they took me through their test program building and their
laboratories. And let me tell you, you think we were in trouble.
Any of the offices that had anybody in them - - and there weren't
many, there were a lot of empty offices - - had a zombie. There was
just no motivation. There was one guy who was excited, because he
was working on image converter replacements for cameras, and he
was able to use it on HE shots. All the others, they were just sitting
there, waiting for the worm to turn, or whatever. It was dreadful.
In retrospect, what it tells you is that it is not unique to us when
something like that happens. It seems to be a universal kind of
syndrome. They don't want to spend money on us because they
don't see the point. I, at that time, with a vengeance, came to the
conclusion that if you don't have anything worthwhile for people to
do, close the program down, put them on something else with a long
string, and if the need arises, pull them back. They'll be happier and
more useful to you than if you let them sit and rot in their offices.
John Foster was the Director of the Livermore Laboratory in
1963, when the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed. One of the
things that was considered to be important when the Treaty was
signed was that there should be a readiness program - - a formal
program to maintain a capability to resume atmospheric testing
should such testing, for whatever reason, become necessary. The
following words by Johnny Foster relate to that readiness, not to
containment.
Foster: I can remember, when we got to the atmospheric test

ban, going to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and trying to argue for the four
safeguards that had been worked out with Scoop Jackson. The day
1 made this pitch to the JCS was the day that Curtis LeMay was, I
think, Acting Chairman. I went through the four safeguards, and
the one safeguard that LeMay hung up on was the one of readiness.
He said to me, "You will never be able to maintain readiness." I was
absolutely thunderstruck. Here was the guy who had created the
Strategic Air Command that had maintained readiness, and he was
telling me, "You will not be able to maintain readiness." I was too
shocked to ask him why.
He was dead right. Only a few years later I was working in the
Pentagon, (Ed. - - as Director, Defense Research and Engineering)
and cancelling the very programs that I had fought for. I was
cancelling them because the plans were made up by people who
didn't understand what they were doing. The people who did had
left to go work on things that would be more productive. And, if
the plans didn't make any sense, you just simply couldn't afford to
keep pouring money into them.
There were some experiments that could be done during the
moratorium. In particular, the were a number of high explosive
experiments done to look at crater formation from various yields of
explosives in various media. One notable such experiment was the
Scooter detonation, which was done at the Test Site. It involved the
detonation of 500 tons of TNT which was stacked in a spherical
shape at a depth of 125 feet. One of the problems with Scooter was
that when the signal to fire was sent, the TNT did not ignite and so
there was no detonation.
Bob Bass, of Sandia, was the project officer for the various
ground response measurements that were to made.
Bass: We started putting the HE in the ground in May or June.
That million pounds of TNT had to be loaded down 125 feet. We
could never do that today. For example, one of the problems
they're having right now with the Chemical Kiloton is how to have
a safety plan for transporting the ammonium nitrate from Mercury
out to Area 12. Don Larson had one of his people find out how they
transported gasoline on the Site, so they could use that plan. Turns
out, there is no safety plan for transporting gasoline, or flammable
material on the Test Site, on the Mercury highway. That's okay, but
you can't move ammonium nitrate, because people have thought
about it. And that's the current kind of stuff we're stuck with.
Anyway, we transported all the HE for Scooter, a million
pounds, down from Hawthorne in twenty ton loads on commercial
trucks. It came in blocks - - it had all been melted and cast.
Hawthorne had so much of that stuff that it was unbelievable. We
also had a whole bunch of spheres made up, and Sandia has used
them for containment tests ever since - - two thousand pounds down
to eight pounds.
Well, we put in all of our instrumentation. We had a trailer
nearby that had a revetement around it to keep the air blast from
hurting it, and the rocks from falling on it. In addition to our
instrumentation we provided the electronics and the place to record
and handle the firing system performance, and people's checkouts
of all that. I was not responsible for the firing, but in a sense I was
involved because I helped hook up the firing set. Bernie Shoemaker
did it, and I helped him with that. Scooter was to be fired with a
pentalite booster block in the center of the charge. That block was
put in when the sphere was halfway installed. The detonators were
sent up from Albuquerque, and they were supposedly war reserve
detonators to be used with a regular firing set, and the people who
did this were the people who would ordinarily do a regular test, a
regular operation. There were extra dets for backups, and so on.
The trouble was somebody sent out sugar loads. They were
dummy dets that didn't have any booster in them. There was no
active final little blue booster to set off the pentalite; they just had
the little wires across the back. These were what was put in.
Everything was fine, except there was no explosive in the dets. We
found out, after they were in, and the HE was on top of them, what
had happened.
So, they sent out some more dets, of the same type. We took
them down to our trailer and said, "Let's fire these things and see
what happens." Bob Burton was in charge of doing this. The
thought was, could we put enough energy in there, to that little
wire, that we would get the pentalite to go. That was the idea, and
we tried. And so we proceeded on. On shot day Neal Thompston,
then head of AWRE was there, and whoever was head of the Atomic
Energy Commission at the time was there. Everybody was there.
Carothers: What you're telling me, if I understand you

correctly is . . .
Bass: That we knew damn well it wouldn't go. We would have
been stunned if it had gone. That would have been the surprise of
surprises. We knew it wasn't going to go, but we wanted to try it,
because there wasn't anything else to do. The explosives were all
stemmed in, and it would have been a terrible job to try to get them
out. And, as we expected, it didn't go.
An investigation group was set up, and Mel Cook, a Utah
explosive expert, was called in to head the committee to see what
to do. They met and met and met, and decided there was only one
approach, and that was to melt our way back down. So they set up
a group to do this, and an explosive safety board to supervise it. We
could never do this today, never in a million years.
What we did was to put a safety perimeter around the shot,
which was established as soon as it didn't fire. About halfway back
toward the Area 10 highway where the access was to the area, we
set up a remote control area to remotely drill back. We moved a
drill rig in, drilled down to the top of the HE, remotely done. When
we got to the top of the HE, then we put in a steel billet, which had
hot water piped to it - -1 don't think it was steam; I think it was just
hot water - - to melt our way back down, through the explosive, to
the center. When this was done, the guts of the billet were pulled
out, and a pentalite booster block was lowered inside this billet,
which now sat in the middle of the Scooter charge.
I was scared to death of the whole operation, but we were out
there monitoring all the time. We were also worrying very much
about our instrumentation cables, because we had all these storms
and rainy periods. We were using white field wire, which was just
laying out on top of the ground. It wasn't waterproof wiring at all,
so we ended up with almost complete shorts in all of our cabling, in
addition to the shorts in all the amplifiers, which were ruined.
So we sat there, burning out all our cabling, all this time. And
we also had some cabling that went into the HE to measure the HE
burning rate. There were concerns about how much current we
could put into the cables and not be a danger to the HE, and all that.
So, we had to monitor the things very carefully. A lot of thought
went into it. We sat there with low currents, just burning out these
cables for three months. We were in the danger area, burning out
our cable the whole damn time. And they dried out finally. All but
the pressure measurements.
So, what did we end up with? We ended up with a lot of radial
accelerometer data that was outstanding. We ended up with some
good horizontal velocity gauge data. We were using the old SRI-
Sandia DX velocity gauge, which was capable of outstanding mea-
surements. It's not used anymore, because it's far too hard to use.
There were some surface measurements too. We made some
surface velocity measurements, and there were all kinds of photog-
raphy done. Scooter was really a very good experiment.
Carothers: There were a number of HE shots during the
moratorium.
Bass: Yes, and Sandia was doing all of those. There was the
Buckboard series in hard rock, for instance, during that period. And
there were a lot at Fort Peck. There is a lot of stuff in the literature
on those, but there is very, very little instrumentation data. Mostly
there are photographs of before and after, and throwout measure-
ments - - sticky-paper trays, and things like that. Vortman put out
beads all over everywhere, and they counted beads in various
samples they took after the shot. There were a lot of people,
including ones at Livermore, who got very excited about how the
crater lips were formed, and that sort of thing. Cratering was a big
thrust. Vortman was digging canals, out on the Yucca dry lake. I
stayed as far away from that program as I could; I wasn't too
interested in that.
The moratorium on testing ended in September of 1961. Fol-
lowing the atmospheric detonation of a Soviet device with a yield of
over 50 megatons as the first of a series of Soviet atmospheric tests,
President Kennedy ordered the resumption of testing at the Test
Site. There was the proviso that the tests should be carried out
underground, unless a specific exception was approved. The first
event at the NTS following the moratorium was the Livermore 2.6
kiloton Antler test, fired on September 15, 1961 in a tunnel. It was
followed by Shrew, a Los Alamos safety test in a drill hole, fired on
September 16, 1961. Both events released measurable amounts of
activity; the activity released from Antler was detected off site, that
from Shrew was not.
During the next few months the experience of both Laborato-

ries showed that the containment of the radioactive materials pro-
duced by an underground detonation was not a trivial task, whether
the device was emplaced in a tunnel, or in a drill hole. The first
eleven events all released activity. During the first year there were
43 shots fired in emplacement holes by Los Alamos and Livermore.
One, Eel, released some 1,900,000 curies, and the activity was
detected off site. Twenty-one released material that was detected
only on site. Twenty-one are not recorded as having released
activity.
Carothers: When the moratorium ended Los Alamos used drill
holes for their shots, and Livermore did their shots in the tunnels.
Was there any kind of agreement, or understanding that Los Alamos
would do shots in drill holes, and Livermore would do tunnel shots,
so there would be experience with both ways of doing the experi-
ments?
Brownlee: 1 don't know that there was anything like that.
Probably there was no reason for it at all. But, at the time I thought
there was a reason. Our perception at Los Alamos, and mine, which
came a lot from Al Graves, and some of AI's obviously came from
Norris, was that Los Alamos had concluded it didn't make any
difference what the facts were, peaceful uses of nuclear energy
would never come to anything. If Livermore wanted to waste their
time with Peaceful Nuclear Explosives - - PNE things - - that was
Livermore's prerogative. But we at Los Alamos would, as a matter
of policy, not devote any of our thinking to PNE type things, and
tunnels smelled of PNE.
Our interest was bombs, and testing bombs, and for that
vertical holes were quite sufficient. If you were going to make
harbors and things like that you had to have answers to certain kinds
of questions which tunnels helped you answer. But everybody knew
- - Los Alamos thinking - - that the best place to test bombs was right
where we were; Area 3. So, don't go near those mountains where
who knows what evils lurk. We'll stay right here, thank you. So,
the impression I had was that PNE was what separated them. Now,
in fact, I do not know what Livermore was thinking, and I do not
know whether PNE figured in Livermore's thinking or not. I don't
know. But I think that's kind of how we saw it, early on anyway.
I would like to remember, but it's probably totally incorrect,

that I was a bit more objective than some of the other people at Los
Alamos. I was never quite so quick to pick up the party line. I always
got along well with Livermore people. But there was a party line;
thou shall not go near Livermore people, because they're all terribly
bad. When I got permission to go to visit Rainier I was the only Los
Alamos person who went and mixed with the Livermore people. 1
didn't mind that, but there were other people who didn't approve
of that.
Carothers: I'll tell you a story I heard about why Los Alamos
never had tunnels. I can't vouch for its truth, but it goes like this.
Once upon a time Norris Bradbury visited the Test Site, during the
moratorium. Livermore was busily digging tunnels, having nothing
else to do. As part of Norris' tour of the Site, Livermore people
took him to the tunnels. They got into one of the little mining cars
and rattled back into the tunnel, which was poorly lighted, wet,
noisy, dirty, and all the sorts of things tunnels sometimes are when
mining is going on. When they came back out Norris said, "My
people will never work under those conditions." And that was that
for tunnels.
Brownlee: That's entirely consistent with Norris. I can believe
that. That's the way Norris was. But it's also consistent with what
I told you; tunnels were unneccesary, unneeded, and we would do
our work in vertical holes.
But I was always very curious about the tunnels shots. I had
seen those sandbags in Rainier that had turned into rock, and the
other things that had happened in the tunnel, and 1 thought that was
very interesting stuff. I went up and visited whenever I could, which
wasn't all that often. Campbell, for example, didn't approve of
Livermore, or tunnels. If you were going to drive up there you
better not let Campbell discover that you drove one of his AEC cars
up there. You had no business being up there. You were supposed
to stay in Area 3. So, whenever I went there I was either on the q.t.,
or I had some special dispensation. I don't know that there was any
reason for that. That's just the way it was.
Well, the Russians terminated the moratorium. Incidentally, I
believe that was done perfectly legally. You hear that the Russians
violated the agreement. I believe the understanding was, "We will
tell you before we shoot again." And they did. They told us the
day before. I think they did what was perfectly legal in the eyes of
the State Department. We had the same option.
They certainly didn't try to conceal it. But Kennedy was irate,
and he called here and said, "How soon can you get a bomb off?"
We must have gotten that call the first week in September, and I
believe our answer was, "We can do an underground shot in one of
our vertical holes in a week." The problem was, that was in no way
a quid pro quo. To do a few kilotons in an underground shot in
Nevada was certainly not equivalent to fifty megatons or so. But,
that's what we were ready to do, that's what we said we could do,
and Shrew, our first shot, was not very long after that.
The point is, we were ready to do that very quickly because we
did indeed have vertical holes ready. And, we knew, or guessed,
how big a yield we could fire in them.
So, through '61 and '62 we did some shots, and we were
gathering information. Before we had the underground treaty in
'63 we had satisfied ourselves that we could get the necessary data
we wanted by testing underground. We had gotten enough infor-
mation to know how to do that. And that was due to AI Graves, and
Campbell, and Newman, in my view. 1 would name those three
people as having done the necessary thinking and preliminary work
to allow us to go that way fairly easily, and in a straightforward
manner.
One of the projects that was significant for containment was
the attempt by people at Livermore to develop a way to collect so-
called prompt rad chem samples. The concept was that there would
be an open pipe running from the device to some collecting station
on the surface outside the tunnel, or by the top of the emplacement
hole. There a sample of the device debris would be collected,
essentially at the time of the detonation, and returned to the Labo-
ratory for analysis. The work following the moratorium was basi-
cally a continuation of the work Gary Higgins had started during
Hardtack II.
There is little question that this effort led to at least two major
ventings. Dick Heckman, a chemical engineer, was in charge of the
field effort to design the pipes and other hardware that were to
collect these samples.
Heckman: After the moratorium I went back to the under-

ground sampling business. There was what 1 called the fast
sampling, which was an attempt to get fast, or prompt samples,
where what I was trying to do was to get refractory bomb debris. In
other words, the kind of bomb debris you would normally get from
post-shot drilling, where the activity is trapped in the melted rock,
which is the standard sort of thing. What 1 was initially trying to do
was develop a competitive process to that.
Carothers: You did your first tries on the shots that Livermore
did in the tunnels, like Antler? You were the guy who was ruining
the containment on those?
Heckman: Yes. Well, I didn't have anything to do with
Antler's failure, because we didn't have time to get the sampling
system set up. I think that you have to give Mike Heusinkveld a lot
of the credit for the ideas. In other words, I'm only guilty as being
the field guy who carried out the concepts that Mike had.
On Gnome there was such an experiment, a fast sampling
experiment. We had a vacuum system with a pipe ten inches in
diameter down to the shot room. It was a beautiful straight, vertical
hole. You could go down into the shot room at Gnome, look up
through that pipe, and at noon you could see stars. It really does
work. You could see stars.
Carothers: You know, I've heard that story, and I have done
a little simple-minded calculation about the solid angle and what
fraction of the sky you see, and how many visible stars there are, and
the probability of there being a star in that patch of sky is so small
that I don't believe you.
Heckman: Fine. I understand all your arguments, and all the
rest of it, but I was there, and my recollection is I saw stars. I'm
convinced I saw stars. Anyway, the point is that is was very straight.
Carothers: It was straight, I know that. You could look from
top to bottom. Did you ever look down and see the stars down at
the bottom?
Heckman: I have acrophobia. I don't like to look down much.
So we had the sampling pipe, and fortunately, it didn't work.
We had enough problems on Gnome as it was, but if that sampling
pipe had really worked, we could have had another Des Moines.
Higgins: On Gnome there was a ten-inch diameter hole

pointed directly at the device. It went to the surface, and it was
open all the way. It not only sealed up, but we probed the inside
of it with a radiation detector down to within two cavity radii, and
were unable to detect the fact that there had been a nuclear
explosion there. There was no activity, not even gaseous activity.
To me that was, and is still, rather surprising, because there was
plenty of tritium tracer around the Gnome explosion, and it was
everywhere else, but not in the rad chem sampling hole, believe it
or not. It certainly went into the tunnel.
Carothers: Well, there were people, Gary, and I'm sure you're
familiar with this, who believed that the way to ensure sealing and
containment on cables and small diameter holes was to always, on
all drawings, and when discussing them, speak of them as rad chem
sampling devices. Then, the evidence was, nothing would ever
come up them. You'd never see an atom.
Higgins: Not even one. You're right, I'm familiar with that
approach.
Heckman: The concept behind all of this sampling work was
that the bomb was going to go off, some of the debris would fly into
the pipe, the ground shock would then squeeze off the end of the
pipe, and now I would have a pressure pulse, and it would be just
like a shock tube.
These were vacuum pipes that looked directly at the device,
and so you put a slug of gas in, and it's equivalent to puncturing an
aluminum diaphragm and allowing a pressure wave to travel down
the pipe. You can very easily show that if indeed it behaves like that,
with the pipe shut off by the ground shock, there's a certain
maximum pressure wave that will arrive at the other end. So you
design a system that will withstand that kind of pressure.
The chemical engineers devised several ingenious schemes to
keep the pipe open, and Dick Heckman describes what was done on
Eel, in May, 1962, and on Des Moines, in June, 1962. Both were
major ventings. The reported release on Eel was 1.9 megacuries; on
Des Moines, 11 megacuries.
Heckman: My good friend Heusinkveld wanted to use slifers

as a way of getting a quick yield measurement, and he came up with
this great idea where he just drilled a satellite hole, filled it with
drilling mud, and stuck his slifer cable in it.
Carothers: And the mud was going to keep it open?
Heckman: Well, he didn't think about what the mud was going
to do. He just knew the mud was going to transmit the shock wave
as it went out. On that same shot, which was Eel, 1 had decided that
maybe I could get an explosive that would get detonated by the
shock wave. I wanted something that would burn pretty slowly, and
nitromethane logically comes to the fore. And so we indeed did
that.
Well, Mike's slifer cable worked fine, but immediately there
was this 150 or 200 foot high column of mud that spewed out of
his slifer hole. Our sampling system worked and we got samples out
of it, but it didn't close off either, so Eel would have vented even
if Mike's slifer hole hadn't been there.
We were not looking at the device itself. These were now
satellite holes. People said that the device goes off, and the cavity
grows out in this length of time, and our thought was that if we could
connect up with that initial vaporized zone, we'd stay connected.
Then we could build very sturdy systems that would take the
thousand psi or so of pressure, with cyclone separators we could
bury underground, and then we could pull samples out of them.
So, we tried a straight nitromethane tube, but what we found
there was that when you look at the burn velocity of the nitrometh-
ane, it burned faster than the ground shock coming through the
alluvium. We probably were exploding the pipe; we were putting
pressure inside at the wrong time. So then we had them wind us up
a helical pipe, where the spacing on the pitch changed as you went
up, and we tried that. This was also nitromethane filled.
We seemed to get a pretty good sample out of it, but the
problem we had was that when the nitromethane went off, razor
blade size pieces of steel just spalled off, and that ended up clogging
up our system. So that clearly wouldn't work. Well, we got to
thinking about it, because Mike had had a spectacularly successful
connection to the cavity on Eel.
74a
Eel venting through pipes intersecting the cavity. May J 9, 1962.

74b
Eel event - the black cloud behind the white plume is the mud and cables ejected from the hydrodynamic *
yield hole.
So we started looking into it, and we ended up going back to

the basic viscosity rules and discovered dilatant fluids. That's
something in which the apparent viscosity is proportional to the rate
of shear. To put it in simple terms, if I could fill a pipe with a fluid
so while the shock wave was going through it the fluid had the
viscosity of solid concrete, it would keep the pipe from crushing,
and then as the shock wave went past, the stuff would act like a fluid.
In looking around we realized that ordinary starch and water
woiild do this. And we added a gel to it. So, we did some tests and
it all looked good in the laboratory. I remember one spectacular
experiment I did. We had a beaker sitting on the table, and I said,
"Okay, if this is really working, what I am supposed to be able to
do is stick a spatula in it, and if I lift it rapidly, it will set up and I'll
be able to lift the whole beaker up.
Carothers: Be sure you don't stop lifting.
Heckman: Well, that was the problem. You can only lift to as
long as your arm is, and that could be right over your head.
However, that demonstration, as far as I was concerned, was a very
practical one.
Carothers: I recall you and Heusinkveld had a sampling pipe
on Des Moines. What clever scheme did you use there to breach the
stemming?
Heckman: On Des Moines we built a section of two-foot
diameter pipe, and what we did is we packed it with polyethylene
tubes, polyethylene pipe, and ran it through the stemming. Mike
put a slifer cable right next to our inlet section, and he put a slifer
cable over along the tunnel wall, and then, of course, that part of
the tunnel was all packed with sandbags. Well, as you remember,
Des Moines was one of the more spectacular containment failures.
Carothers: When you designed this horizontal pipe for your
inlet experiment, and stuffed it with the polyethylene tubes which
would vaporize and explode and keep the pipe open, what was going
to close it? If you had deliberately prevented the ground shock from
closing it, what was going to close it?
Heckman: Well, Mike didn't really think that one completely
through, and it never occurred to me to worry about it, because we
had that big gas-tight door, right? You were going to get a little
activity out, sure. Remember, this was all kind of back-of-the-

envelope, and so you didn't really think about what kind of pulse
that was going to be put out.
Well, when we looked at the signals from the slifers, the slifer
he put by the tunnel we never did get a signal out of. The one on
the pipe just took off, and clearly was moving at about two to three
times the free field velocity. When you tried to look at the signal
that was coming off of the slifer on the side of the tunnel, comparing
that with the free field slifers that they had installed in other
locations, it was just very clear that the shock wave coming out of
our pipe was just blowing it up.
It became also very obvious at this point that you don't get just
a little bit of the dragon's breath. Once you connect with the
dragon, he keeps blowing. So, as you remember, the blast door that
was sealing the tunnel came flying out.
Carothers: Richard, everything came flying out.
Heckman: Yes. And it's just very clear that Mike Heusinkveld
and I were responsible for the Des Moines fiasco.
Carothers: Well, you can't really claim all the credit. There
was a vertical rad chem sampling hole that looked from the top of
the mesa down to the device, and pictures from the fast cameras
show that vented immediately, in less than a millisecond. 1 do
believe that your attempt to keep the pipe in the tunnel open
succeeded, and led to the venting out the portal. But even if that
hadn't happened, Des Moines would have had a big release due to
that vertical sampling pipe. So, maybe we should give Des Moines
to the chemists in general, rather than to you in particular.
The following pictures of the Des Moines venting, on June 13,
1962, were taken by the author with a hand-held camera. The
pictures were taken at irregular time intervals; the elapsed time
between the first and last is probably about ten minutes. The total
release is recorded as 11,000,000 curies, which is one of the largest
releases from any underground event. Regardless of what definition
is chosen, Des Moines was not successfully contained. It is instruc-
tive to observe the amount of material ejected from the tunnel by the
energy release from what was a rather low yield device.
In the pictures there are three distinct venting paths that can be
seen, The first is from the rad chem sampling hole that led to the
mesa top. As was mentioned above, material was released there
within the first millisecond. The second release occured through a
hole that ran from the the face of the mesa down to the tunnel, and
can be seen as a plume that appears before the venting from the
portal develops. The purpose of this hole was basically to protect
the diagnostic film in the trailers near the portal. The thought was
that if there was venting into the tunnel, the pressure would be
relieved by having an open hole from the tunnel to the mesa face.
Hopefully, such pressure relief would allow the door near the portal
to remain intact, and so prevent radioactive material from blacken-
ing the diagnostic films in the trailers near the portal. The third, and
major release, was from the portal after the gas-seal door had been
forceably ejected.
Des Moines; Fired in Tunnel U12j on June 13, J 962. The plume from the initial venting
through the vertical radiochemistry sampling hole, which occurred within millisconds,
can be seen at the top of the mesa.
± 'Mi
77ie second release path was through the pressure relief hole, and occurred within
seconds. Material is beginning to vent from the portal, lower left.
•f ' • V» -Vfi
• •a
'»rj
*P*#M^M&
/is f/ie venting was established out the portal, the first two vent paths became less
important.
A
!r» i -
K^'
MMKaP^-itt>, »
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' - J
. .1
.^'-
t;-'-i
TTiere WOJ essentially no cloud rise. The sandbag stemming and the material scoured
from the tunnel itself stayed close to the ground.
There were between one and two hundred people in the area at shot time. At about ten
minutes it seemed prudent to leave the scene.
However, neither the Des Moines venting, nor that of Platte

(about 2 megacuries) in April of 1962, nor that of Eel (about 2
megacuries) in May of 1962, caused significant problems to the
overall test program. They were significant problems to the people
at Livermore, particularly the people trying to collect data on film,
but there was no stoppage of testing while the causes of the ventings
were explored, there were no changes in field procedures, and so on.
Des Moines was detonated on June 13, 1962, and the Dominic
operation was actively being carried out in the Christmas Island
area. In the week preceding and the week following Des Moines,
there were a total of seven airdrops of devices of intermediate or low
megaton yield. If 10 megacuries is taken as the H+12 hour activity
from 1 kiloton of fission, the Des Moines release was about that of
a 1 kiloton atmospheric shot. That was trivial compared to the
activity being released in the Pacific, and perhaps that influenced
the AEC. On the other hand, it was close to home, and the people
whose data were lost were not happy.
In all, Livermore fired seven tunnel events after the resumption

of testing in 1961, and only one, the Madison event was contained.
The last Livermore tunnel event was Yuba, fired on June 15, 1963.
It was not contained and released material that was detected off the
Test Site.
It was in 1963 that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, widely known
as the Limited Test Ban Treaty, or the Partial Test Ban Treaty was
signed. As observed in the first chapter, the Treaty did not say any
event had to be designed to contain all the radioactive products that
were produced - - only that the radioactive debris should not cross
the border of, in this case, the United States. For example, nuclear
cratering experiments continued until December 8, 1968, when the
30 kt cratering event Schooner was fired, presumably under meteo-
rological conditions that would retain the vented activity with the
boundaries of the United States for some indeterminate time.
Containment failures, as defined today, occurred both before
and after the Treaty was signed. Most of them were minor seepages,
but some were major failures, particularly for the experimenters
trying to collect information from the detonation. There were a
variety of reasons for the ventings, and it was not always easy to
determine the cause of those failures.
Brownlee: There was Bandicoot, in 1962, in about the first
year. There was nothing wrong with the containment design,
nothing wrong with the emplacement, or anything like that. I think
that was all done right. We had everything placed assuming the yield
we were told it would go would in fact be the yield. The hole was
deep enough for that yield, but I believe there's no doubt it went
well above that. We had enough hydrodynamic data that we were
convinced of that. And so, the hole was just too shallow, and it
vented. It was just that there was this enormously surprising yield.
Now, why was the Bandicoot yield so surprising? Well, it was a type
of device where nobody can estimate yield very well. Of course,
what we should have done was put it much deeper, just to be
conservative. But, you see, we took the designers word for it; what
the yield would be, and what the max cred was.
That as one of the few times when the yield was, in effect,
dictated by a committee, which paid little attention to data that
didn't fit the desired results. It was designed to be so many kilotons,
so that is what it was. And it wasn't. It just wasn't.
Carothers: I have noticed, at the CEP meetings, that you are

often skeptical of numbers we get from the designers.
Brownlee: You've noticed that?
Carothers: I have noticed that. Perhaps that's because of your
experiences with Bandicoot and Pike.
Brownlee: It's more than that. We've had a number of times
where I have seen idiocies promulgated as fact. And it's done for
political reasons. You understand how that goes; we have promised
the Navy, or the Army that this thing is going to be so many
kilotons. And, that's what they are going to get. Never mind what
the yield really looks like.
Carothers: Well, Bob, you must realize that having promised
a particular yield, over the course of this many year development
through the Phase 3 and into the stockpile, there has been lots and
lots of money and time spent on targeting plans, training manuals,
and so forth, all based on that yield. Now, you're not going to come
in at some late date and tell them the yield isn't what you promised
them, are you?
Brownlee: Yes, if it is different. 1 do understand the cycle
you've described, but I do believe that the quicker the country finds
out that something is different from what they thought it was, the
better off the country is.
1 was bitter about Bandicoot. 1 had done what I had been told
to do, which was to contain this shot where the yield was going to
be thus and so, and that's it. After the fact they insisted that's what
it was, and it was just a lie. I had my own hydrodynamic yield
measurements, and those measurements gave a much different
number, and 1 have no reason to take them back today; they were
good measurements. Now, we have relooked at Bandicoot. We
went back and drilled for more samples. This was during Eric Jones'
stay. Eric reviewed all my data, and when he got all through he said,
"The hydrodynamic data are correct." By this time we had gotten
rid of the guy who was the problem, and so we got them to concede
that the yield really was a lot higher than it was originally reported.
In early 1963 an informal meeting was held between Los
Alamos and Livermore test principals to evaluate individual tests.
The intention was to share procedures, plans, and lessons learned,
but containment was not a major part of the discussions. After the
Limited Test Ban Treaty was ratified in October in October, 1963,
the Eagle event vented. Considered as a probable violation of the
treaty, the event triggered additional discussions on containment at
various levels in the Laboratories, and in the AEC. From these, the
Test Evaluation Panel was formally established in December.
The Panel consisted of consultants, and persons furnished by
LASL, LRL, Sandia, DOD, the Public Health Service, and the AEC.
The USGS furnished the geologic information. The purpose of the
Panel was to "review all data pertinent to the containment aspects
of each planned nuclear test; then, based on these data, to assign the
test to one of the risk categories defined below."
The TEP had three categories, much as the CEP does, but there
the similarity ends. The TEP Category A, in 1966, was "Under-
ground nuclear tests which, on the basis of experience, should not
release a significant amount of radioactive material. It must be
understood that, even in this category, unforeseen conditions may
develop which result in the release of detectable levels of radioac-
tivity at the border." The NVO Planning Directive for 1964 said,
"The emplacement and firing of devices will be designed to result
in containment in all cases where this requirement is not inconsis-
tent with the technical objectives."
Cliff Olsen, long time Livermore containment scientist, made
these comments about the TEP:
Olsen: The people who tended to be at the TEP meetings were
the Test Group Directors, and they presented the shots. The
presentations were very rudimentary. There was a data sheet, and
maybe a Iine-of-sight pipe layout, or a stemming drawing. Often
there was no stemming drawing, because we had generic stemming
plans. There was LASL 5, or LASL 2 at that time. We would have
our stemming plan, which was pea gravel with fifty feet of sand
halfway up, and fifty feet of sand at the surface, and that was our
stemming plan. So, there was no need for a drawing, because they
were all the same. The TEP got into reviewing the designs of
particular features a lot more than the CEP does. In a sense, they
would suggest changes, and they would actually review mechanical
designs - - why don't you do this, why don't you do that. And design
changes to the hardware were made as a result of the TEP.
One of the things with the TEP, which 1 guess was sort of
indicative of the climate at the time, was there were three catego-
ries, A, B, C, and C was, "Underground nuclear tests which are
expected to release a significant amount of radioactive material."
There was no particular onus to getting a C. It simply meant that
you made different notifications before you shot it. It had nothing
to do with whether you were going to execute the event. It wasn't
that somebody in Washington or Germantown was going to have a
hemorrhage when he saw it. It was just the design of the event.
One venting in particular, from the Pike event, fired March 13,
1964, has had a major and continuing impact on the Test Program.
The fallout projections for following events have been based on the
"Pike Model," which means that the possible fallout from the
proposed shot is scaled to the readings that were obtained in the Pike
fallout pattern according to the yield ratio of the two events. The
basic assumption is that the proposed shot will release the same
fraction of the activity that Pike did.
Brownlee: Pike has cost all of us enormous amounts of time,
and effort, and money, and I think needlessly. That is a thing I have
never been able to communicate to N VO in modern times. You see,
one of the things everybody forgets is that we had a Iine-of-sight
pipe on Pike. It didn't come to the surface, so people forget that
it was there. And, since it didn't come to the surface, although it
went a substantial distance, it had no closures or anything. That
pipe was one of the key factors. Another was that Pike was expected
to have a maximum credible yield of a certain value - - not very
large, but definitely not a safety shot. Well, it went over one and
half times the max cred. And then, it was in a very shallow hole;
400 feet or so.
What I knew about it was that it had this predicted max cred,
and the pipe was so long and so big. I said, "A lot of energy is going
to come to the top of that pipe." I did not realize that there was
any chance that the yield could go higher than what I was told, or
I would have hollered. I knew that it was in a shallow hole, so that
bothered me as it was. Another thing I did not know was that when
they drilled that hole they had run into what I called hourglass sand.
And guess where that layer of sand was - - which I found out after
the shot. It was right at the top of that pipe.
Now, there's no chance in the world we will ever duplicate

Pike. First of all, we won't shoot anything at 400 feet. Secondly,
we won't have a pipe on it like that. Thirdly, in a medium where
the sand was running like water - - we'll never do that. And finally,
having a max cred yield as bad as that is kind of unthinkable. I say,
"Kind of unthinkable." When you combine all those things, Pike
was a lead-pipe cinch to be spectacular.
My argument is that to treat every shot like Pike is absurd. It's
just absurd. There isn't anything that's going to vent like Pike,
because we don't do those things anymore. We will never duplicate
Pike, and yet we pretend to the world, and to society, and to the
President of the United States, that this shot we're considering
could come out like Pike did. We don't intend to communicate that
message, but that's what we do, and it's just not true. It's not going
to come out like Pike, because Pike had too many great oddities.
Pike is what really brought us to every detail going through the
hands of the containment people. We said, "No more are we going
to take anybody's word for anything." The Pike experience was
profound for us, because that's when we realized that no one person
was knowledgeable about everything on a shot. I was responsible for
certain things, but not everything. After Pike we began to function
in what I'll say is a modern way. We had a meeting in which the
bomb designer had to come and swear he knew what the yield would
be. That really came as a result of Pike. Before, it was by chance.
You knew what you knew by who you happened to talk to, but if
people were on vacation, or you were on vacation, you didn't talk
to them, and you didn't know whatever it was they could have told
you. I learned a bitter lesson on Pike, which was that I thought 1
knew what the shot was and I didn't. I didn't know the yield, I didn't
know the geologic setting, and I didn't know about the sand. All
these things came out in the wash.
Bob Bass, Sandia, Albuquerque, was doing instrumentation
work on the hydrodynamic yield measurements that Los Alamos
was doing at that time. He also had information that Brownlee
didn't have.
Bass: Pike could have been foretold. 1 was on the instrumen-

tation crew. We were doing hydrodynamic yield measurements on
Pike, and we had three satellite holes. Our job was to instrument
these satellite holes. We had a guy named Jim Greenwald, and he
liked to play with TV. He was our installation engineer when we
were lowering these slifers and/or time of arrival gauges down these
holes. Pike, of course, wasn't very deep. Well, Jim called me and
said, "You've never seen such a mess in your entire life. 1 lower my
TV camera down there, and it's a cavern. I've got communication
between every one of my satellite holes, all the way down. 1 go a
hundred feet down and there's no sandpile down there. There's
nothing but a labyrinth of tunnels."
Well, we tried to put in enough stemming to fill up that cavern,
but we didn't get it done. We flat didn't get it done. We got it done
for a while, but then it would start again. We knew that site was
Swiss cheese. That shot was sitting there waiting to vent.
Brownlee The first political fallout was about the fallout. It was
on Las Vegas, and it also went straight toward Mexico City. 1 think
somebody in the embassy read something and didn't know what he
read, and it never really did get reported in a sensible way. 1 don't
believe you'll find any record of a measurement having been made
in Mexico City, but I believe there was.
Then Al Graves had a meeting, and I went, and Westerfelt, and
for the first time we put together all the things that were wrong.
And 1 was appalled. So we, at the second level, bared our breasts
and said, "Well, we had done this, and we had not done that, and
the yield was quite a bit higher than we were expecting, etc." Then
Washington came down hard on us on all those points, but they
knew these things because we told them about them.
The thing they knew was that it had crossed the border. We
made lots of promises of brand new procedures, which indeed we
did initiate. And we really changed our working relationships after
Pike, between the people at the Laboratory, and the people in the
field doing the engineering and drilling. 1 remember that as being
profound. We said, "This will never happen again."
87
4
The Beginnings of Containment Programs
As time went by, the tolerance of releases of radioactivity from

the underground detonations at the NTS diminished until it became
obvious to the Laboratories and the DNA that serious effort must be
given to all the questions that such releases raised. And the list of
questions was daunting. What was it that prevented such enormous
energy releases from rupturing the ground and thereby releasing the
gases, steam, and radioactivity to the atmosphere? Obviously it was
related to the amount of material over the detonation. In what way
did the necessary amount of material depend on what the material
was? How was it related to the chemical composition of the
material, the strength of the material, which in turn is related to the
amount of water in the material? How does the material react to
pressures of millions of atmospheres, and to temperatures of many
tens of thousands of degrees? Does it matter if the material is
fractured or faulted, and if does, how? What pressures and tempera-
tures actually are created in the material, and how do they decay
with time?
The original thoughts about doing experiments underground
arose from pressures to reduce off-site fallout, and desires to make
the operations easier to carry out. Contamination of the shot sites,
and radiation exposures to people working in the field gave addi-
tional incentives to the Laboratories to find different ways to
conduct the tests. In a similar way, the releases that occured on
some of the underground shots were a problem to those trying to
collect experimental data. At first, political pressures to achieve
better containment were minimal, but by the time of Baneberry in
1970 they became controlling.
Olsen: It must have been late '65 that I started to do things
in containment. There had been several leaks, but the political
climate of the time was sort of, "So what?" But the Test Program
people really didn't like getting trailer parks exposed, because
virtually all the shot data was on film, which turned black if it got
irradiated, and there went the data. If you put the trailer park
upwind, nobody really cared if you leaked a little bit. But the AEC
people eventually began to think that we ought to be a little more

careful. The straw that broke the camel's back was a thing called
Diluted Waters, which was shot in Frenchman Flat in ]une of '65.
1 remember 1 was working on something in Yucca at the time.
1 was driving over the old Burma Road, and heard the countdown
for Diluted Waters on the net, so 1 parked the car and watched it.
At zero time there was a little dust, and a few seconds later a big
cloud came out. A few other cars had stopped, and the guys
watched for a while, and then we decided, "Oh well, another one,"
and we started our cars and went out to Yucca Flat.
After 1 got back to Livermore, my division leader, Jim Caroth-
ers, called me into his office, and asked me if I would be interested
in something called containment. It seemed the AEC had gotten a
little worried that we were having some problems, and Diluted
Waters had kind of sensitized enough people that the AEC was going
to form an investigating committee to look into it, because we had
guaranteed we had solved the problems. We were involved even
though it was a DASA shot. Now, we thought we had solved some
of the line-of-sight problems on earlier things, going back to Eagle,
in'63.
Carothers: Mr. Olsen, since Eagle released enough energy to
create an explosion at the surface which completely destroyed the
surface structure and the experiments thereon, 1 cannot say that 1
would use Eagle as an example of how you had solved things.
Olsen: Well, no, but it led us to things that needed solving, let
us say.
So, in '65 this Jim Carothers asked me to look into containment,
and it turned out at that time it had to do primarily with line-of-sight
shots and the diagnostics thereof. So, we went scrounging for
recording equipment for slow diagnostics, as compared to reaction
history. We were looking at tens of microseconds, and millisecond
response rather than nanosecond things. We got help from EGscG,
primarily Santa Barbara. And some from EGscG Albuquerque,
which at that time existed.
We were looking basically at flow in the pipe itself; time of
arrival, pressures, as well as radiation coming up the stemming and
the pipe itself. We were looking at how you could attenuate flow
in a pipe. If you want to do that you obviously have to look at what's
going on.
The Beginnings of Containment Programs 89
Carothers: How did you do that? Pipe flow is still an

interesting, difficult problem.
Olsen: That is true. We tried lots of things, some of which
worked, and some of which didn't. We used ordinary pin switches,
and pressure pins. We used pressure transducers. We used optical
time of arrival things, slifer cables both inside and outside the pipe.
We used radiation detectors.
Carothers: And Io and behold, you discovered that indeed
there was a lot of pipe flow, and it often came right out the top of
the pipe.
Olsen: That's right. And it got to where we were measuring
differential pressures, we hoped, across closure mechanisms. If you
saw zero above, and a lot below, it said that thing really closed, and
really worked. These were man-made closures, as opposed to
ground shock driven. There were high explosive driven, and
mechanically driven, closures. And there were lots of varieties of
those. There were ball valves, and flapper valves, and so on.
Carothers: Did any of them work?
Olsen: Yes, some of them did, although some of them didn't.
In fact, some of them were probably worse than if they hadn't been
there. Probably the worst one we put in was a thing called HE flaps.
They were dimples that had been cut in the pipe at alternating spots.
You put little pads of HE on them, and shoved pieces of the pipe in,
rather than trying to close it symmetrically. The idea was to obscure
the pipe by pushing things in. One version of these flaps was to cut
the pipe at the bottom of the flap, and shove this flap in so that
something coming up the pipe would come to the area of the pipe
where this piece had been pushed across, and the flow would then
just go out into the stemming.
Carothers: Say, that sounds clever.

Olsen: That was really clever. Unfortunately, this thing
weakened the pipe so much that what it did was put a tab of material
out in the flow, and that tab could rip off very easily. So, the whole
thing went right on up the pipe.
We had a few other disasters on Iine-of-sight pipes. Some, like

Tapestry, weren't too bad. The reason it leaked was that some
valves at surface ground zero jammed a bit and didn't close all the
way.
Carothers: Did you ever have a successfully contained pipe
shot?
Olsen: Oh yes. Probably the best ones were Crew and Flax.
They were unusual in that the pipe terminated underground, and we
had the things there that we wanted to expose and follow for a time.
Obviously you had to close the pipe, or there wouldn't be anything
there to look at. Both of those events were quite successful.
Packard was another one where we had exposure stations about
halfway down the pipe, and we wanted to pull them up the pipe to
recover them. That was quite successful. We closed everything off
below the exposure stations.
By then we knew about things that didn't work, like the HE
flaps that just put more mass into the flow. We knew not to put an
HE closure, even though the closure worked, in too close, because
the ground shock could simply go around it, as if it weren't even
there, and still have enough energy to pour energy into the Iine-of-
sight pipe. So, you have to put even a fast HE closure far enough
out so the ground shock doesn't just envelop it and keep going. We
learned that closer isn't necessarily better. We learned how to build
valves that would seat in the environment. We learned how to
decouple them, if necessary, with joints and things like that, to
modify the environment so they would survive.
We had a better capability, by then, to look at the energy in the
front end, and to look at things where we could limit the energy
going in. Often, in the early shots the experimenters wanted
everything they could get. So, they wanted bigger and bigger
apertures.
Carothers: That's still true. The experimenters always want
more than they can have.
Olsen: That wasn't always true though. On Flax, for example,
we put a segment of a pie-type collimator in the front of the pipe
to cut down on the flux. That, of course, made it easier to close,
because part of the path was already plugged. When the experi-
menters got to be a little less grabby about wanting everything it
sometimes made things easier. But a lot of it was trial and error.
The Livermore Hupmobile event, fired on January 18, 1968,

released activity that resulted in a major loss of data, and radioac-
tivity was detected off-site. It did not result in the kind of long-
lasting operational changes that Pike did, but it did lead to the
formation of a separate group, responsible for the design of the
containment plan, at Livermore. Cliff Olsen and Billy Hudson
became two of the first members of that group.
Olsen: In those days I think ninety percent of the reason for

expending effort on containment related to data loss, rather than
pressure from Washington. That begin to change probably around
' 6 7 to ' 6 8 . It may have been as a result of Hupmobile, because the
people in Washington who supplied the money, even though they
were not so worried about the loss of data as the experimenters, got
antsy about dumping money into these things and not getting
anything in return. Hupmobile was quite expensive for the time. I
think that may have been the first thing beyond strictly experiment-
ers wondering why their film was black.
Hudson: Hupmobile turned out to be a containment fiasco, in
that a lot of the film data was lost due to the radiation release. The
decision was made at the Associate Director level to form a
containment group, and to try to put some serious effort into
understanding containment and saving the film. ]im Carothers
asked me to join that group, and it appeared to me to be an offer
I couldn't refuse.
I believe it was in late 1 968 that happened. For about the first
two years Bill McMaster and I used to have some words now and
then about how this surely wouldn't be more than a two year
problem, and then we could get back to doing some science. "We'll
figure this out, won't take more than two years, then we'll get back
to interesting physics." Fortunately, it got more and more interest-
ing, because it turned out to be much more than a two year problem.
Carothers: I'm surprised that the containment group came
along so late, because there were a number of Livermore events
earlier that had been, by today's standards, quite catastrophic
containment failures.
Hudson: Personally, it was my impression that we became

interested in having a containment group because so much data was
being lost on experiments like Hupmobile. On the earlier events
there weren't that many experiments, so it was a relatively small
loss, even though they perhaps lost a major fraction of what they had
on the event. It was a small loss compared to the loss on Hupmobile.
And, programmatic people decided that since this was the direction
they wanted to go, bigger and more comprehensive experiments,
something had to be done about containment so they would have
some confidence that after spending all that money on the test they
would get the data back. The primary problem then was to protect
the film so the prompt diagnostics folks could go back to the
Laboratory, read the film, and tell the bomb designers what they did
right or what they did wrong. It was not to protect the environment;
it was to protect the data.
The Partial Test Ban Treaty had been signed in 1963, several
years earlier. The Treaty said we were not to do any experiments
where radioactive material would go beyond the national bound-
aries of the U.S. That was a primary guideline; no radiation across
our international borders. But in fact, measures had already been
taken to pretty much limit the escape across the border. Just by the
act of putting a few hundred feet of dirt over the device you almost
always eliminated radiation getting to the border. There were a few
events after the early sixties that released material that may have
gone across the border, but they were very few. It was mostly a local
problem, because the radiation leakage would be confined almost to
the site of the event itself, or maybe a little larger. But, it was that
local radiation that was causing the damage to the film containing
the data, and that was the kind of problem most often encountered.
If we had a release that got up to the neighborhood of ten
thousand curies there was a possibility of activity getting off site.
Less than a thousand curies was of little or no concern to the general
public, or the people in Washington. However, it was of great
concern to the people whose film was in the recording trailers.
In the late 1960's, early 1970's, they were doing some
exposure experiments, with an open Iine-of-sight pipe to the
surface. It took a few tries before the hardware was properly
designed to stop the rush of hot gases and refractory products to the
surface, but that problem was pretty well solved by the time the
92a
The Baneberry event, detonated December 18, 1970. IOKt, hole U8d.
92b
containment group was formed. I don't think people realized it, but
we didn't see much more of the Hupmobile type releases on our
Iine-of-sight shots after we formed the containment group.
The Baneberry event, detonated on December 18, 1970 with a
yield of 10 kilotons, was the watershed in the history of containment.
It was fired in an emplacement hole in Area 8, and had a vertical,
non-divergent line-of-sight pipe. It vented spectacularly through a
fissure, a little over three minutes after the device was fired. The
cloud of dust and debris rose some 12,000 feet, and was reported to
have been seen by people at the N VO offices in Las Vegas. The total
release is today given as 6,900,000 curies (H+12 hours). Interest-
ingly, almost all of the activity was the volatile and gaseous ele-
ments, so there was little fallout deposition from Baneberry. The
integrated total activity in the fallout pattern, on the ground, was a
small fraction of that in the Pike pattern.
The wind patterns before the shot indicated the transport of any
effluent to the northeast, and so the Area 12 camp, to the west of the
shot site, had not been cleared of the people staying there. However,
surface winds carried some of the activity to the west. During the
time it took to alert the people in the camp, and to clear the area, a
number of people received radiation exposures, and some of those
filed lawsuits in the following years, alleging damage to their health
and longevity.
The AEC allowed no more detonations for some six months
while a committee, called the Vinceguerra Committee, after the
Chairman, examined the causes of the venting, and the method of
operations at the Test Site. In the report of the committee several
recommendations were made for changes in the way future test
operations should be carried out, and how improvements could be
made in the way the containment aspects of an event were evaluated.
One of the recommendations was that the Test Evaluation Panel
should be reconstituted, and a new Charter developed for the new
Panel. The Containment Evaluation Panel, as the new Panel was
called, consisted of a Chairman, one member and an alternate
nominated by each of LASL, LRL, Sandia, DNA, USGS, and the
Desert Research Institute. In addition, provision was made for the
Manager, NVO, to appoint one or more consultants. Members
nominated by particular organizations, or consultants recommended

by the Chairman, were formally appointed by the Manager, NVO, to
serve on what was an advisory Panel to him.
Carter Broyles, Sandia, was one of the first members of the
CEP.
Broyles: 1 think the members of the Panel all recognized there

was a political need to be met, to prove to the nation that we were
paying attention. And clearly it was evident in the series of
proposed charters, and hassling that went on between Nevada and
the Labs and Washington on just what the charter should say. 1 think
I viewed from the very beginning that the CEP took it's role as a
technical judgment body seriously, and more than just political
window dressing.
In fact, I think some members perhaps were over-enthralled.
Not so much over-zealous, but perhaps they did not have a full
appreciation of the limits of our technical knowledge, and therefore
tended to give themselves more credit for how sure they were of any
technical facts than we really were. They didn't necessarily
recognize the technical limitations, and the lack of knowledge of
geophysics and geo-engineering, and what the characteristics of the
real world were, how variable they were, and the limitations of the
calculations.
Clearly various parts of the structure looked different from
different perspectives, and the CEP, I think, was many different
things to many different people. But the Panel itself, from the very
beginning took its role seriously, and took it as a technical challenge
to do the best job they could, because it was obvious that the world
was going to be different after Baneberry.
The Livermore containment group had been in existence for
some two years when the Baneberry venting occurred. During those
years they were supported as part of the overall testing effort, but
their authority to affect a particular shot was questionable. That
changed significantly after Baneberry.
Hudson: Following Baneberry the Test Program was shut down
for six months, and the people who designed bombs and wanted to
get data back were suddenly aware that containment was a very
important factor to be considered. It was the beginning of a
movement directed toward the idea that we shouldn't have anything

out at all. If it was above background, it was too much. It was clear
that was where people were headed.
There were about a dozen people in the containment group at
that time, as I recall, and I would guess that two-thirds of them were
involved with calculations. This is when the major effort was
directed at adapting the codes that first had been used for bombs,
later to describe what's going on in the pipe, to describing what's
going on in the earth. It was clear that the interaction between the
bomb and the ground might be the ultimate worry, not just the
interaction between the bomb and the pipe.
Carothers: Clearly demonstrated by the Baneberry venting.
Why didn't the containment group prevent that?
Hudson: Well, that is an interesting question. At that time the
containment program was really under the umbrella of the Test
Director and the operational folks. We didn't have a Containment
Evaluation Panel. In those days we had the Test Evaluation Panel,
and the Test Evaluation Panel was more concerned with having a
successful experiment than they were with containment. As a
result, when containment aspects of an event were considered, they
were presented by the operational side of the program.
We in the containment group were operating in a support
mode. If they wanted to pay attention to us they did. If they
thought that the concerns we had wouldn't lead to an expensive loss
of data, then they didn't. The objective was still to bring back the
data. And as a matter of fact, they brought back data on Baneberry.
What we did say was that we should run some logs in that hole,
and find out what kind of densities and velocities we really were
shooting in. We did ask for them, but we didn't get them, because
we couldn't make a good enough case for it. We couldn't say, "Hey,
if the velocity is below this, or the density is below this or above that,
we're going to have a release problem, or a vent." We just knew
there were questions we would like to have had answered before the
event. We knew there were some things that were new and
different, and that we didn't understand.
If we could have said, "Hey, you're going to lose a lot of data,"
then we would have gotten their attention. But as far as containment
per se is concerned, we didn't have a lot of leverage. And, we didn't
know we were going to have a horrific containment problem. We
just knew that there were some things about the site that were
unusual, and that was our cause for worry. But we didn't have any
theory as to why we were worried. We were just worried because
it was new and different. Without having a really logical, well
thought out reason for delaying things, it was hard to give credence
to our fears.
Carothers: You might contrast that with today, almost twenty-
five years later. Today if the containment group said, "We have
fears and we don't know the answers," you would be listened to
more, I believe.
Hudson: I think there's no doubt about it. The attitude today
is that we have to demonstrate why somebody's fears aren't really
a problem. In those days somebody had to demonstrate why a fear
was a problem. Today we're almost in the position of having to
prove negatives. ]ust the opposite was true in the past. Then we
had to prove that there was a problem. Today we have to
demonstrate that there's not a problem - - as well as we can.
Recognizing the changes that were taking place, and the strong
requirements that were being developed for complete containment,
Los Alamos organized a formal containment group in 1970. Bob
Brownlee had been working on the containment of underground
events since 1956. In 1966 he was joined by Carl Keller, and they
did a number of calculations and experiments related to line-of-
sight shots, but it was not until after Baneberry that a containment
group, per se, was formed.
Carothers: When did there get to be somebody working on

containment besides you, or when did there get to be a defined
containment activity?
Brownlee: It was at Baneberry time that we actually formed a
containment group, and I became the group leader. We finally
decided that between Baneberry and when we started testing again.
The first step in that direction was actually back in 1966, when Ogle
said, "Get somebody and teach them." So, I hired Carl Keller. He
was young then. I'm the same age now as then, but he's older for
some reason. I hired Carl, and just spent time with him. We started
going through things, and learning, and doing things, and I started
transferring jobs to him. Before that some people were named as
doing containment. That is, there was somebody in J-6, and there
was somebody somewhere else, there was me and Carl. These

people stayed in their own organizations, but they were supposed to
work on containment. In effect we had a very small containment
group scattered around the Lab.
Carothers: When you say, "formed a containment group,"
does that mean these people now physically came to work in one
area?
Brownlee: Yes. J-9 was formed at that time. Jack House was
in J-8. He had a little training in geology, so I latched on to Jack
right away, and got Jack into the group. Then, after we had that
group, I hired Fred A p p . I started hiring people for the purpose of
containment. Bob Sharp and Tom Weaver were both in J-9, the
containment group. And so we had some pretty good guys, and for
the first time we had some geologists.
So, the containment effort, as you see it now, is really derived
from that containment group, J-9. That's when we started down
that path.
House: I had never actually heard anything about containment

until that December morning in 1970 when Baneberry vented. I
happened to be in Mercury in the J-3 operations group office,
waiting to ride into town with Bob Newman, who was then one of
our Test Directors, to get a plane back to Los Alamos. There was
this ominous gray cloud rising up over the Gate 2 0 0 pass. I didn't
know what it was, but Newman proceeded to tell me that LRL had
a really bad leak. We could see the cloud all the way into town. I
happened to be sitting on the left side of the aircraft as we flew
towards Albuquerque, and I could still see that cloud when we were
clear out over the Grand Canyon, until the sight angle became
diminished to the point where you could no longer see it. That was
my first introduction to containment.
About two months later 1 got a call from Ogle saying that I was
being temporarily reassigned to a new group that was being formed
under Bob Brownlee. It was to be a containment group called J-9.
Apparently Ogle told Brownlee that he had to form up a purpose-
oriented containment group, and he could pick any of the J group
numbers not in use, and Bob picked J-9.
The people who were in J-9 were Brownlee, Bob Sharp, Carl
Keller, and a few other folks, probably less than ten, that Brownlee
had assembled from other groups in the Laboratory. So we had this
little cadre of dedicated personnel who were to do "containment,"
whatever that was. I didn't know anything about containment
except probably how to spell it.
At that time, in early 1971, we were in the six months test
moratorium mandated by the Atomic Energy Commission post-
Baneberry. Now we were supposed to have information, geological
information, about the shot sites. All the emplacement holes that
Los Alamos had in inventory were cased. How can we do site
characterization and examine the material properties in a cased
hole? So, we initiated a drilling program for exploratory holes, in
close proximity to the emplacement holes, that could be sampled
and logged.
We initiated our program of exploratory drilling, and sampling,
and so forth. Because we didn't have the necessary expertise to do
the geologic analysis, the data went to the USGS at Denver, where
Evan Jenkins and Paul Orkild and their people did the analysis. The
USGS would then put together a site characterization package - - the
cross sections and the whole nine yards. Livermore at that time was
able to do those kinds of things in-house, because they had the
necessary personnel. Billy Hudson and Cliff Olsen had been doing
containment work for a few years, and they were our distant
colleagues in this new, for me, world.
It was a real circus in those early days of 1971 while we were
still learning the containment business. We didn't have any
designated presenter for the events that came before the new
Containment Evaluation Panel, as Livermore did. As I recall, Billy
Hudson was the designated presenter. And we had no containment
scientists as we know today, or event managers, as some people call
them when they're trying to figure out what a containment scientist
is. Well, how do we do this thing, which we had never done?
The very First event that was presented by Los Alamos to the
CEP was a shot in Area 3. Bob Brownlee sat at the CEP table and
read the prospectus to the Panel. 1 was sitting in the audience along
with essentially all the rest of J-9, there being only a few of us, and
that's how the presentation was made. The USGS sat in the
audience and responded to whatever geological or geophysical

questions were posed by the Panel. Bill Twenhofel was on the Panel,
and he was the USGS representative.
Carothers: No. Bill was on the Panel, but Jack, there aren't
representatives of organizations on the Panel. There are indepen-
dent experts. They may make their living by working for some
organization, but they don't represent that organization.
House: Yes. I do understand that you do work hard to try to
maintain that distinction.
Anyhow, Brownlee soon became dissatisfied with this mecha-
nism of reading the prospectus to the Panel, and he concluded that
Los Alamos would need a designated presenter. He also decided
that we needed individuals who would be assigned to prepare the
prospectus. They were to pull everything together from all the
different venues, like the engineering folks who were doing the
diagnostics rack design, and the operations folks who were drilling
the holes, and backfilling them, and so forth. Carl Keller had been
writing the prospectuses. Then one day Brownlee came to myself
and Roy Saunders, and said, "Okay, we have a couple of these one-
point safety tests, and they're in these little shallow holes, and
they're not very complicated. Roy, you write one up, and jack, you
do the other one." Arid so we did.
Carl made the presentations for a while. Then, I guess he
decided that really wasn't his cup of tea. So Brownlee called me one
evening at home, and dropped this little nugget in my lap, saying
that I was going to start presenting all the events. I was not real
comfortable with that. Bob prevailed, as Bob always has, at least in
my case, and Io and behold, not too terribly long thereafter I was
standing at the podium presenting an event to the CEP. Lacking any
experience, I mimiced Billy Hudson in my presentation. As time
evolved, the containment prospectus preparation and presentation
became my task, with a lot of support from my colleagues.
We continued on with the USGS supplying our geologic
packages until about 1974 or 1975, somewhere along in there.
That relationship was not always comfortable for the USGS people
up in Denver, because we didn't know, in the early days, what we
really wanted or needed. So, those guys didn't know quite how to
respond to our needs. As a result, we had some interesting
meetings, hosted by the Lawrence Radiation Lab, about things like
grain density - - what did we need to measure in grain densities, and

how should we do it? Should we use the air pycnometer, or should
we use this other kind of trap, or what? And what should we expect
in alluvium, and what should we expect in tuff? And how about the
lavas in Pahute Mesa? So, there were problems in determining data
needs.
Then, in late 1974 the USGS made an incredibly gross error
in the assessment of a Paleozoic scarp location near a hole in Area
4. That caused us to have to drill a special exploratory hole, do
sidetracking, and so on. The ] Division management, Brownlee in
particular - - as an aside, Brownlee had been moved on from being
the J-9 group leader to being an associate or assistant division leader
in the ] Division office - - decreed that ]-9 should hire a geologist,
and diminish our dependency on the USGS.
Where were we going to get a geologist who knew anything
about the Test Site? Well, we had Fenix and Sisson geologists who
supported Los Alamos as our "well-sitters." They sat the emplace-
ment holes, or the exploratory holes, as they were being drilled on
the Test Site. So we thought, "Let's pick the guy assigned to Los
Alamos, and let's hire that guy. He's got to know something about
the geology of our test holes."
We hired a young man named Mike Ray from FscS. Mike came
to work with me, and we then hired a geophysicist to do well-log
analysis on the Birdwell logs supplied to us. Gradually Los Alamos
developed enough of a geoscience capability that we were able to
tell the USGS that we didn't need their geologic packages anymore,
because we were going to do that in-house.
We, I think, separated ourselves from the USGS without
acrimony. I think, quite frankly, the Survey was relieved to get out
of that production mode. That's not their cup of tea. They are
primarily a research organization, and they don't like to be called
and told, "Look, we needed this yesterday. Where is it?" And then
to be called back and told, "Well, we got it, but it's not right. Now
you need to do this, and that." There weren't many of those
occasions, but still, that didn't fit the Survey's view of themselves.
So, here we are in the mid-seventies now, and we have our own
geosciences capability. House is making all the presentations and
writing all the documents, and so forth. That went on until 1979,
when we changed Lab Directors. Harold Agnew left the Laboratory,
and Don Kerr, a former ] Division staffer from years before, took
over as Director. One of the very first things he did was to dissolve
J Division, the field test organization. He spread out the groups that
were in ] Division to other divisions, such as WX, weapons engineer-
ing. Then they looked at the containment group and said, "What
shall we do with these guys?" Well, Brownlee was then the
geosciences division leader, and that seemed like the right place to
be. We do geoscience stuff, and Brownlee is known in our
Laboratory as the father of containment at Los Alamos, and so let's
put these guys, the J-9 guys, over there in G Division, and call them
G something or other.
I've forgotten why they chose to dissolve J Division. It was
much to the dismay of the people in ] Division. We all ended up
working for other existing divisions in the Laboratory. The diagnos-
tic guys were all put in the Physics Division, and they were called the
weapons physics guys. The field engineering and rack design guys
were put in WX, under a management they had not previously been
associated with.
Kunkle: I was hired by J-9, but when the paperwork was done
the group called itself G-6. By the time I showed up in 1980 it was
calling itself G-5. According to rumor that was because Don Kerr,
the then Director, decided to get rid of] Division, the field testing
division, in the fall of 1979 because'he was concerned that a
comprehensive test ban would soon be enacted, and a field testing
division would be something easily clipped out of the budget. So he
decided to - - I wouldn't say hide - - submerge those activities in
other divisions. One of the divisions created, an artificial division,
was G, the Geology Division, and Bob Brownlee became the division
leader of that.
House: Actually, J-9, the containment group, came out best,
because we were reassociated with our former boss, and that worked
out reasonably well for us, and for the containment organization.
There were three supporting groups, discipline oriented. There
was geology and geochemistry, geophysics, and something called
geoanalysis, which we just called computer jocks. So we were in
some common organization which has metamorphosed through
being called Geosciences, then Earth and Space Sciences, to now
being called Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Then the Containment Project Office was created, and I was

named as the Deputy Project Leader. In late 1980 the gentleman
who had lasted but eight months as the Principal Project Leader
decided to seek other employment, so he bailed out and went to
another division which had nothing whatsoever to do with
containment. As a result of that Bob Brownlee called me into his
office one day and said, "I intend to make you the Containment
Project Manager." I was either too stupid, or too stunned, to say
no, and so that became my task, in addition to making the
presentations, and writing the documents, and all this other large
load of responsibilities.
After two or three months, maybe as many as six, 1 went to
Brownlee and said, "I can't do all this. It's too much." He said,
"Well, what do you want to do then? How do you want to structure
this?" I said, "I want to follow Livermore's model of having
containment scientists, or event managers. I want to make a
selection of people, and for openers I'll pick Fred App, who's one
of our CEP members, and Eric ]ones, and Nancy Maruzak, and we'll
make them into containment scientists. They will be responsible for
the event from the time I assign it to them, and we lay out the
parameters for it, with the yield and the location. And they'll carry
it through the presentation, and ultimately the post-shot report, to
the Panel." Brownlee said, "Okay, we'll try i t , " and so we did.
And that's where we are today, except with far fewer people.
At one time in our glorious past, which, as I recall, was fiscal year
1984, the Containment Program had 34 FTE's, which represented
about 42 to 45 actual personnel. That was pretty big, and it was
pretty much paralleled by our colleagues at Livermore in their
containment program.
Brownlee: When the containment goups were large, and even

before, there were a good many opportunities for Los Alamos and
Livermore to work together toward common goals. There were also
many opportunities for disagreements. At any given time, both
kinds of activities were on-going. It was therefore possible to
believe that no cooperation ever occurred, or that good together-
ness was possible, depending upon just where one happened to sit.
I happened to have one foot in each activity, and remember a few
occasions when Los Alamos asked cerftain questions that caused
some difficulty for Livermore in public meetings, yet the result
enhanced certain arguments that Livermore's containment people

could not win at home. So, some debates were based on what I will
call "a non-obvious agenda".
House: A sidelight that I would like to bring to your attention
is the incredible acrimony that existed between Lawrence Livermore
guys and Los Alamos containment guys in the early, if not almost
all the way through, the seventies. It seemed to be initially
precipitated by two adversaries across the table, who shall remain
nameless, who got into a shouting match one day at a CEP meeting.
I remember it as well as if it were last week. Those two gentlemen
were summarily removed from the Panel by the Chairman. One of
them, by his choice, no longer works at Livermore, and the other
one, by his choice, is retired from Los Alamos. But for a long time
there was an incredible acrimony; there was a real bad - - them guys
at Livermore, and vice versa - - attitude.
Carothers: I know the two gentlemen to whom you refer. I
remember the situation, and I did remove them from the Panel. I
must say I had a little difficulty with Los Alamos. I talked to
Brownlee first, and he was understanding of my position. Then 1 got
a call from Dr. Charles I. Brown, who informed me that the Los
Alamos Scientific Laboratory would decide who would be their
representative on the Panel, and that was not something that was
within my purview. I explained to Dr. Brown that Los Alamos did
not have a representative on the Panel; that was not the way the
Panel was constituted. The Laboratories, and other organizations,
nominated people they felt were reasonably expert in the field, and
subject to the Manager's approval, and mine, those people could
serve on the Panel. Anyway, I won.
House: Yes. I noticed that you did, and I have remembered
that. And, quite frankly, the tension level was reduced dramatically
as a result of that change of personnel. Anyway, to carry on with
this, and not to beat a dead horse, it wasn't until Larry McKague
became Livermore's containment project leader, then succeeded by
Frank Morrison, that we started working together to try to reduce
this tension and acrimony. I remember Carl Smith sitting at the CEP
table one day and commenting about the acrimony that apparently
existed between the two Labs. That caused me to think about how
we could defuse this. We were viewing the attitude of our
containment colleagues at Livermore as a "hassle LASL" attitude.

I thought that was no good, and that we ought to do something to
fix that.
The first real case of a friendly gesture was when the late Frank
Morrison invited me out to sit in on a Livermore pre-CEP meeting.
This was absolutely unprecedented ! Sit in on a pre-CEP? That's
inviting the enemy into your camp; the fox into the hen house. But
I went, and it was great, although I was a little uncomfortable,
needless to say. Then after the pre-CEP, that evening I was invited
to Frank's home, and he had some of the Livermore containment
folks over for dinner. That was what really broke the ice, I think.
After Frank's tragic demise I continued to work with his successors,
up to and including Norm Burkhard, the current program leader.
We have, I think, maintained a much better attitude. We don't hold
hands, per se, but we do talk to each other, and when the
Laboratories independently review each other's containment pro-
spectuses prior to presentation to the CEP we try to air all our dirty
laundry, behind the scenes and before the CEP meeting, so we don't
get in there and have one of these acrimonious activities.
Carothers: Do you think that's proper?
House: The reviewing of each others shots? I think that's a
very important part of the checks and balances that seems to be built
into the containment community. And of course you must under-
stand, it doesn't exist just between the two Laboratories. We get
comments from the USGS, whose primary focus is on the site
characterization package. When Russ Duff, of S-Cubed, was on the
Panel, he would call me up with a concern, and we would discuss it.
Sometimes it was a simple question that needed explaining, and
perhaps Russ didn't feel he might want to raise it in the forum of the
CEP, but he really wanted an answer. As far as the two Laboratories
looking over each others shoulders, and as one wag has been known
to say, "keeping each other honest," I think it's a very important
part of the way we do business.
There have been occasions when either Lab has served notice
on the other one's event, via the prospectus mode and response.
"Maybe you guys ought to look at this," or "Have you really
calculated that, and do you really believe those numbers?" So 1
think it's incredibly important, and it's been something we've
continued. The way it works is quite simple. We transmit the
prospectus to the containment community, and of course the other

Laboratory is included, and we expect a response within a week or
two. It usually comes as a FAX, and is prepared by one of the
principal containment members of the organization. In many cases
it's the CEP member, like Cliff Olsen at Livermore, or Tom Kunkle
at Los Alamos. And there will be questions and comments on the
event. And then we interact, and it's most helpful.
Carothers: Then why do you need a CEP? And I do not mean
that as a frivolous question.
House: No, I don't take it as such. Why do we need a CEP?
The Panel represents a rather broad scientific experience base.
Hydrologists, geologists, radiochemists, people who are well versed
and have expertise in the calculational side of the house, and people
we might refer to as phenomenologists. These folks are looking at
the sponsoring Laboratory's containment plan from, hopefully, an
independent viewpoint. So you have nine or ten individuals
reviewing and discussing and questioning the plan of the sponsoring
Laboratory. It provides a review that is, in my experience,
unparalleled for plans of operations that are going to go forward,
especially with something as critical as an underground nuclear test.
The Containment Panel review has a distinct ES&T.H aspect to
it. Back in the days before Admiral Watkins we didn't call it ESscH,
but it certainly is environment, safety, and health oriented, and it's
a big part of the whole thing. There have been occasions when the
sponsoring Laboratory had an event reviewed by the Containment
Evaluation Panel, and has had to step back and say, "Well, maybe
we didn't do this quite right. Maybe that hole isn't suitable for that
event." And so, appropriate steps and responses are taken. Once
again checks and balances are in play.
Carothers: There are some people who feel that the process
has gotten to be pretty cut and dried, and that it has become a kind
of ritualistic process that you have to go through. And that the CEP
doesn't really do much, other than providing a public facade of
reviewing the Laboratories' and DNA's activities.
House: I think you would find, if you ask any seasoned member
of the containment staff at either Los Alamos or Livermore, or at
the DNA, they would strenuously object to that. To some it may
seem like a rote process, where you go to the Panel, and you stand
up and you present the standard set of viewgraphs, and you make
the standard apple pie and Chevrolet arguments. But the fact
remains that you are having your containment plan reviewed by, not
a peer group, but a group of experts in the field of underground
testing. While it may seem like the same old stuff, every time we
go to a Containment Evaluation Panel presentation, granted it is
repetitive, you will find that each containment scientist is extremely
sensitized and concerned about the design they have put together.
And not just to get it approved.
Carothers: When a person does a presentation, in front of
friends and peers from his or her own Laboratory, and people from
a couple of other, may I say possibly competing organizations, and
from various other places, there are going to be questions about
various aspects of the plan. Basically that person doesn't want to
look stupid. I wouldn't want to stand up there and make a fool of
myself.
House: 1 know what you mean. I've been there, ]im. But
consider this. Both Laboratory containment staffs have what we call
pre-CEP meetings. Or you could refer to them as dry runs for the
presentation. The way we like to view it is that it's a heck of a lot
easier to take flak here at home, from your peer group, and be
prepared, and be able to answer the majority of questions that
presumably might be posed to you, versus doing it in front of the
Panel. I likened the CEP presentation, to Brownlee, and mind you
this was back when I was doing them all, in many cases one a month,
especially during the high yield test series in '76, to be like
defending your doctoral thesis once a month.
It's a pretty stressful situation, and sure you don't want to look
bad, and sure you'd like to get your event properly categorized and
approved. But by golly, when push comes to shove and the Panel,
as a whole, or as a individual Panel member, finds something that
is unsuitable, whether it isn't understood, or what have you, we
better to step back and take another look rather than try to move
forward with something that might cause a problem at shot time.
And, you don't want to present something that might not make
it through the detonation authority process. I can remember one
time when the Chairman's recommendation to the Manager, and
the Manager's subsequent forwarding of the detonation authority

package back to Germantown didn't guarantee the event was going
to get approved by Headquarters.
Carothers: It has happened once only that the DOE Headquar-
ters has refused the Manager's request for detonation authority.
That was for the Kawich event, and I consider that to have been an
embarrassing failure on my part. I went to the Manager and
apologized for having put him in that situation.
House: Well, it is an awful feeling, and as I said, I have been
there, to stand up in front of the Panel and get put on the run. Once
I got a post-presentation viewgraph from my Livermore colleagues
about the "wounded rabbit" syndrome. Or, to have an event come
up to categorization and have someone on the Panel give it a
dissenting vote. It stops everything dead in the water.
The DNA took a different route than the Laboratories in
approaching the problem of containment. They were doing both
vertical and horizontal line-of-sight shots, with limited success in
containing the radioactive products of the detonation. And, like the
Laboratories, they were losing experimental data. Joe LaComb,
DNA, had much of the responsibility for the way the events were
designed and constructed, but he had no person designated as
responsible for containment.
LaComb: By 1966 we cared about containment, and I cared
about it, because it was the same as it is today. If we don't keep all
the detonation products in close we don't accomplish what we want
to accomplish. We lose our experiments. On Double Play, which
was in June of '66, after we had problems with Red Hot in March,
Discus Thrower in May, and Pile Driver in June, Jack Noyer came
out and said, "How long will it take you to build an overburden
plug?" So, we built an overburden plug in five days. We put that
plug in because our containment record wasn't very good. We
already had a gas-seal door in the drift, so when we ended up we had,
in general, the same kind of configuration we do nowadays, al-
though we didn't have a lot of the things we do now, like cable gas
blocks. That plug was strictly for public safety and health. It wasn't
going to help our experiments at all.
1 don't think at that time DASA had anybody who was

designated as the person to be concerned about containment.
There wasn't really anyone who was given that responsibility, other
than jack Noyer. Being the kind of person he was, he tried to worry
about it all. A person I listened to was Wendell Weart, from Sandia.
He was the one who came out when we had questions regarding how
should the stemming be placed, should the hook drift be left open
or should it be backfilled - - those kinds of things. Mel Merritt was
another one who helped.
It was about that time that they started doing calculations with
a bunch of folks who were with General Atomics. It started out with
some GA folks involved, and there was, right after Double Play,
some RAND people involved. For Door Mist, in '67, it was those
contractors who were doing the calculations, and were saying we
want this kind of grout with this kind of strength, and so forth. As
far as the overburden plug and the gas-seal door went, that was more
or less our engineering problem. There were no real criteria.
So, there wasn't anybody in DASA, in the Door Mist time
frame, in 1967, saying it was this or that, that DASA wanted. The
contractors were saying, and saying more or less directly to myself
and the Test Group Director, "This is what DASA wants." Some-
body said they wanted a plug, or particular kinds of grout, but it
wasn't my job to define those things, only from the standpoint that
I tried to make sure we got the materials that the "experts" thought
they wanted.
Right after Door Mist, where we had more problems, Noyer
told me, "That won't happen again. You're going to take care of
this." I said, "Yes sir." We could see we were going to have to pay
some significant attention to protecting the experiments, and to
stopping leaks. So, after Door Mist, for every test I sat down, and
I wrote out the criteria for the grouts; what the velocity should be,
the strength should be at least this, and so on. And I set down
criteria as to how things were going to be done, and what should be
done. I worked fairly closely with the people doing the calculations,
although I didn't understand what they were doing, at that time.
It was, in our program, always a constant threat that the people
funding the experiments would decide that the possibility that they
would lose a lot of their data was too big to take a chance on. That's
one of the reasons DASA tried to turn things around so rapidly after
the four in a row in '66. I don't think it was so much a big concern
about the fact that we were releasing a little radiation to the
atmosphere. It was the loss of the experiments, and our credibility.
I think that has always been a factor, and still is.
About that time we formed what we called the Stemming And
Containment Panel Junior, or SACPAN Junior, which was a working
group. It was a real mixture. There was Court McFarland from
headquarters DNA, who was an aeronautical engineer, but very
interested in materials behavior. There was Ben Grody, who had a
doctor's degree in geology, and Bob Bjork, who was, and is, an
excellent physicist, myself, and jerry Kent. That group, in my
opinion, really turned our containment program around. I think
that group was the real foundation of the DNA containment
program.
When Baneberry happened we were working on Misty North.
We were also getting ready to field Diagonal Line. We had to go and
present a risk-benefit analysis for the Diagonal Line shot to get
permission to Fire it, because some guy named Jim Carothers, on the
Panel, said it was going to leak. Actually that turned out to be good,
because it did leak, and we had gone through it, and they had okayed
it with that possibility in mind. So, they weren't surprised. We also
had to do that for Misty North, because there wasn't a whole lot of
confidence. Fortunately, that one contained.
We also had the presentations we had to make to the CEP, and
there were problems with some of the early shots when we presented
our material, in getting our ideas across about what we were trying
to do. I was talking to Carl Keller one day, and we were kicking ideas
about this problem back and forth. He said something about vessels,
and I said, "You know, it might be worth thinking about that." So,
it was when he and I were talking that the seed was planted, I think.
I decided there had to be a logical way to present this material, so
you could say, "That will be coming in this section here." So, I sat
down and I said, "Okay, we've got three vessels, nested together,
and each one backing up the ones inside it." So, I started writing
up the presentation based on the three vessel concept. I made out
the outlines, and then went back and started writing how you would
do it. They're still using some of the same words today.
In '74 DNA hired Carl Keller to be the Containment Scientist,

and early on he began to develop an experimental and calculational
program to try to understand some things about what was going on.
Through the years, thirty to forty percent of our effort with Pac
Tech and S-Cubed has been in research, to do something new and
different, to find out something. We've got to do our production
work that's associated with the test, but it's essential to me that we
still keep enough effort in there to try to find out if there isn't
something there, something we're missing. I always have the feeling
there's a shadow lurking around the corner.
Keller: When I came to DNA I think the title of the position was
Containment Scientist, and there was a job description associated
with that, as the Civil Service requires. That job description had
been developed by jay Davis, my predecessor at DNA by more than
a year, and by the Director of the Test Directorate. This was a new
job description, with their new concept of what the Containment
Scientist ought to be doing.
At that time DNA had numerous problems, and they had
decided that they needed a heavier gun in the Containment Scientist
position. They upgraded the position from a GS-14 to a GS-15,
which meant they could offer more pay. I know that they had
solicited several senior people in the containment business to take
that job - - people far more senior than I was. Those people, I
suspect, were already above that pay grade, and probably well
established in the Laboratories. 1 wouldn't say I was the bottom of
the barrel, but I was certainly not their first choice for the position.
It was an interesting environment at DNA. They hadn't had
any recent leaks, but they had had some real encounters with the
Containment Evaluation Panel. I remember one of their presenta-
tions to the Panel where they had decided not to present any of the
mechanical closures, because they felt those were only relevant to
sample protection. Therefore, the DNA people who were present-
ing the event refused to present any details about the closures,
because that was irrelevant to containment. Well, the Panel refused
to categorize the shot, because they thought the closures were
relevant to containment. Then Phil Opedahl, who was the Test
Group Director on that event - -1 believe it was Husky Ace - - stood
up and said, "Just a minute. Mr. Chairman, could we have a short
recess?"
After the recess it was, "We'll provide you with any of the
information you want." It was pretty clear where the concept that
the mechanical closures were not containment features came from,
because for many years thereafter )oe LaComb still insisted that the
MAC's were not containment features. I never agreed with him on
that point, and so we always described them fully in the CEP
documents.
One of the concerns was that it handicapped the Test Director
to have all these non-containment features included in the
containment presentation. But it was decided by the Panel that
those features were important to containment. And the Panel was
right. You can say with confidence that after Mighty Oak those
features were thought to be very important. So, that's an old
concept that's been abandoned, but I don't think DNA totally
abandoned it until a couple of years ago.
When I came to DNA their containment program was really
being managed by S-Cubed. There was no Containment Scientist,
and had not been one for over a year. DNA was doing as well as they
could with the few military people they had, some of whom were
quite new to the business. I wouldn't say they were desperate, but
they were really being controlled by the contractors. DNA had very
little in the way of technical capability in-house, so they really relied
almost completely on their contractors, and S-Cubed was happy to
step in and supply all the advice the DNA needed.
For me it was a totally new environment, dealing with contrac-
tors, because when I was at Los Alamos contractors were considered
second-class citizens; rude, mercenary, science-for-hire kind of
people. They are still mentioned with a sneer. It was at DNA that
I discovered that contractors did offer far more than you'd ever
believe from the way they were considered at Los Alamos. I found
they really were responsive, partly because you controlled the purse
strings, but also because they were very capable. My whole staff was
essentially contractors, and over the next ten years I gained a great
deal of respect for them.
The whole concept of contracting for support does isolate you
a bit from your staff, but you do define what the deliverable is to
be, and what the price will be, and what the schedule will be. I found
that I got results from the contractors much more predictably than,
say, a program manager at Los Alamos would get from his staff.
That's because his staff might be scattered all over the Laboratory,
and he was always competing with other programs in the Laboratory
for the attention of those people he needed.
I found 1 very much enjoyed the contracting process as a way
of doing a program. It really worked, and we got a lot of good
results, though I was always worried when the contractors agreed
with me. Was it because 1 had control of the money, or was it
because they thought I was correct? And 1 was never sure.
113
The Nevada Test Site
During 1948 and 1949 a committee headed by Lt. Gen. E. R.

Quesada developed a list of five potential sites that might be used
for continental nuclear tests. The candidates were the White Sands
Proving Grounds in New Mexico, Pimlico Sound in North Carolina,
Dugway-Wendover Proving Grounds in Utah, an area between
Fallon and Tonopah in central Nevada, and the Las Vegas-Tonopah
Gunnery Range in Nevada. In 1950, after the approval by President
Truman of continental testing, some 1360 square miles of the
Gunnery Range were turned over to the AEC for the conduct of
nuclear tests. The Nevada Proving Grounds, now kown as the
Nevada Test Site, currently has an area slightly larger than the state
of Rhode Island, and lies some 70 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
There are various criteria which could be used in the selection
of an area to be used for nuclear testing, the importance of each of
which would depend on the judgment of the person or persons
making the selection. Remoteness from populated areas, availabil-
ity of air, rail, and highway transport, security, and so on are
important criteria. Another thing that would be of importance is the
type of nuclear tests to be conducted, or which might be conducted,
although that did not appear to be a factor in either the selection of
the Pacific Proving Ground, or the Nevada Proving Grounds.
Enewetak and Bikini, for instance, were too small to do experiments
to explore the effects of the detonations on structures or military
hardware, Crossroads notwithstanding. The possibility of under-
ground detonations was not considered when the selection of the
Nevada Proving Grounds was made.
What would be the geologic characteristics of a suitable site,
where underground detonations were to occur, and the radioactive
products were to be contained?
Brownlee: I'm of the opinion that we have not actually had to
address that problem, thanks to the fact that we are where we are.
In other words, we were blessed, in a sense, by being put down in
a place not of our choosing; the Nevada Test Site. We have made
the best of that without having the freedom of choosingwhere in the
world we'd like to go to do the best underground testing.
As we've understood from the Soviets, and from the French,

and from anybody else who's tried to test, we've had a wealth of
different sites and different media, with opportunities for different
kinds of tests. If we want to test in granite, we can; we don't have
to go to North Africa. If we want to test below the water table, we
can. If we want to test above the water table, we can. We can test
in various kinds of alluvium, and in various kinds of tuff. Most places
in the world are not blessed with all of those opportunities. So,
without having had any opportunity to select the site, we have been
lucky, if lucky is the right word, in being able to find a great variety
of media within the confines of the Test Site.
Carothers: Do you mean that if in the fifties someone had said,
"We want you to test underground. And, not one atom out. Pick
a good spot, in the United States, and you can have it," we probably
wouldn't have picked a place as good as the Test Site?
Brownlee: Absolutely. If we had used our heads we would
have been in terrible trouble. We were very slow to learn all of the
different opportunities we had for the different kinds of tests that
we wanted to do. For example, did we want to mine a big room?
At the Test Site we could. Did we want to do something and throw
a little dirt on it? We could. Did we want to lay something out on
the surface and shoot it? We could. We could do that because in
those very early years we were sufficiently removed from anybody
that we essentially had everything around us, and a long way around
us, under our control, with a few exceptions.
When we went underground the number of milk cows in the
fallout pattern we might have would sometimes be three, or six. The
number of people for whom you would have to provide the means
of evacuation, were that to be needed, would be twelve, or twenty.
What's happened with the Test Site since those days is that people
have moved right to the boundaries of the Test Site, and there are
literally hundreds and thousands of everything and anything. But
people see the Test Site as it is, and they don't understand that it
was selected as it was.
Early, it seems to me, we had an emplacement hole and we used
it. Even after Baneberry we still used the hole that was there. We
had them stockpiled, and we tended to use them. It took us quite
a little while after Baneberry before we really selected a site we
wanted for the shot. I think it's only in relatively recent times that
The Nevada Test Site 115
the containment people have had some input, really, as to which

hole they wanted for a given shot. There are times when we will
have a deep hole, and shoot near the top of it. That deep hole was
drilled for something else, but we make use of it. I can find all kinds
of examples, still, where we don't select the site as logically as we
are able. We do things in tuff that might better be done in alluvium,
and so forth.
There is one other thing, and that's the water flow. I think it's
bad business to get plutonium into an aquifer. It happens that at the
Test Site the water doesn't go anywhere. To the first approxima-
tion, it just sits there. AI Graves didn't know that either, when he
selected the Test Site. And so from a radiological point of view, a
hydrologic point of view, the Nevada Test Site is peculiarly able to
support testing.
On the other hand, on two or three occasions we've found
debris from shots at places that we had no expectation of it being.
That tells me it's entirely possible that things are going on down
there for which we have only had an occasional whiff. And that we
are not anything like as knowledgeable about the water flow as we
think we are.
Carothers: 1 have talked with the folks who calculate what
might occur in different types of rocks, if you were to shoot in them.
They don't like very hard rocks like granite because of the tensile
cracks that show in the calculations. And they don't like very weak
rocks because they don't sustain the residual stress fields thought to
be important for containment. Something like tuff or alluvium turns
out to be just about the best you can do. Isn't that surprising?
Believe the calculations or not, they imply that if we were in some
other site it probably wouldn't be nearly as good.
Brownlee: We couldn't have possibly done as well, because I
don't think there's any other place that could be as good. Now,
that's said out of ignorance too, but let's look at Pahrump, which
was actually considered. The whole history of the world would have
been different. The water table there is so high that all of our testing
would have been different, and we would probably have had the
Russian experience of having something come out from each test.
Or we'd have spent so much money that we couldn't have afforded
it. I bet you anything that if we had started out testing in Pahrump
either we would have abandoned it, or we would have still been
there and, for example, we would never have had room for the
British. All kinds of things would have been different. It's really
true, I think, that the selection of the Test Site actually was a
branching point in history. We took that new road without ever
knowing why or what we were doing, but I feel it was a very
fundamental action.
As an aside, we are in the process of losing the Test Site for
underground testing, and no one seems to know or care. The
majority of the NVO budget is now devoted to things other than
underground testing. And their interests are in Waste Management
and various other kinds of things. They don't mind bringing in all
kinds of people, and building new things, and doing new experi-
ments. They would sell off any part of the Test Site to keep NVO
green, and they have so cluttered up the Test Site with other kinds
of activities, which are now sacred, that it's increasingly difficult to
get a shot off.
And you haven't seen anything yet. I actually challenged one
of the Assistant Managers at NVO a few months ago, and said, "I
believe the biggest threat that we have to the Test Site is NVO. It's
not the people on the borders. It's not Las Vegas. It's not the anti's.
It's ourselves. We're our biggest enemies." I didn't know whether
I could get away with saying that, but he pondered it a while and
said, "I see what you mean, and I believe you're right. We really
have plans for doing all kinds of things." They're preparing for a
moratorium, and so they're going to do all kinds of things.
They imported a lot of activities during the last moratorium.
And when we go into another test moratorium, which I figure will
come one of these days, I don't believe we'll ever go back to being
able to use the Test Site again. I've said what I think are the
characteristics of the Site that are to our advantage, and I believe
that there is hardly anybody in NVO who understands them. They
do not appreciate what they have. They do not appreciate what it
means to have such a place.
I believe that as long as there's a nuclear stockpile we have to
have the ability to address questions which may arise. That might
be continued testing, or it might not. It might mean a nuclear test,
or it might not. I'm talking about questions which may arise, and
we have to have a place where we can go to answer them.
Nowadays, I visualize that being underground. Even chemical
experiments could be underground, and not on the surface. We

need a variety of ways to be ready to answer a variety of questions.
So, we need alluvium, and granite, and tuff, and shale, and dry, and
wet, and space, and mesas, and valleys. We need it all, because we
do not know which part of it we can give up. I believe we will have
a nuclear stockpile for at least the next four decades. Forty years.
I can't conceive of getting rid of it in less than forty years time. I
would like to think we can, but I can't believe that we'll be able to
do that.
If you look at what's happened at NTS in the last forty years,
it's an exponential curve. And if we have any kind of a moratorium
it will get worse. With Baneberry we stopped testing, and at the end
of six months, every week we delayed it was harder to start. We
almost didn't get started up again; it got harder and harder as time
went on. I think that if there is any kind of a moratorium, it will be
that way again. And so, I almost despair over the loss of our Test
Site, because I think it's happening, and NVO couldn't care less
because they have no appreciation of what I've been trying to say.
I shouldn't say, "no appreciation" because I've been lecturing
to them, and waving my arms at them, and writing things down and
showing it to them. But it doesn't take. After all, we don't have
to pay any attention to what Brownlee's saying. We've got this
waste management program, and the President has said, Secretary
Watkins has said, "We've got to clean up. That's the urgent thing."
So, NVO is no longer interested in stockpiles and testing; that's just
way down on the list. You noticed in the memo we got from
Watkins, where he outlined all the things DOE did, that he never
once mentioned nuclear tests at all? It's not listed in his long list of
things that had to be looked at. Nuclear test is not mentioned. So,
the DOE has little appreciation of what I'm saying.
And what's worse, neither do the Laboratories. This question
that you've asked me about the Test Site I think is an exceedingly
important question. We ought to recognize what the Site means to
us, and I think we don't. Notice that I've said, "Despite all the
opportunities we've had to use it cleverly, we haven't." And now
I'm saying, "Even though we've learned as much as we have, we're
getting ready to throw it away."
That's the reason why I spent quite a few months writing a

document on the preservation of the Test Site. And I got Troy
Wade to finally enunciate the DOE policy on the preservation of the
Test Site, which in effect says to N VO and ALOO that any decision
made about the day-to-day operation of the Test Site has to be made
with the idea that we're going to preserve it for testing. I was hoping
by that means to get something down on paper which then I could
wave in NVO's face, saying, "When you bring in these rug mer-
chants, that is contrary to the policy of the preservation of the Test
Site."
But doggone it, there is something kind of sacred about the
Test Site nowadays. Put away the conservationists, and the preser-
vationists, and the purists. We have done some things there that are
special in history. They are. In the history of the world, a thousand
years from now, that's going to be something kind of special. We
ought to have that in mind as we act, but our concern is only this
year's budget. That's all. And we ought to be bigger than that; we
ought to be thinking more broadly than that. I'm saying, "Here we
have the Test Site. We could use it much more cleverly than we do,
but we're only interested in the current budget with this fiscal year's
shots. That's our only concern, and therefore, we just do things as
they come." I think that's a grave mistake. I doubt that we will ever
do it any other way because that's the way our government is, and
that's the way we are. But I wish it were otherwise, and I would like
to really understand more about containment by doing things of
various kinds at the Test Site.
Another point I want to make. I only learned in recent years
that when it comes to space you don't need a nuclear test to affect
it. You can seriously affect space with just a little bit of energy. If
you have what the United States government assumes is empty
space, a vacuum, it doesn't take very much mass there to change it.
Actually, the United States government is mistaken, because it's not
empty at all. It's already cluttered up with a lot of things, and so
when we put something else up there and put a little energy there,
it interacts with the stuff that's already there that we've put there.
This is not appreciated. Well, I believe it's a grave mistake to do
experiments in space that can be done underground, or in tanks, or
in other places. And the NTS has the capacity to allow us to do
many space-like experiments. Now, they say, "Oh, you can't have
a mountain that will hold a vacuum." A lot of the key questions that
you need to answer in space are not those questions, and they could
be answered easily in Nevada. So, 1 think we ought to preserve the
Test Site for space research, strangely enough.
Carothers: That does seem strange.
Brownlee: But let me use this analogy; I said we originally
thought of using the Test Site on the way to the Pacific. I think we
ought to use the Test Site on the way to space. And so I'm not really
talking about space experiments, I'm talking about some stepping
stones on the way there. And for reasons that are lost to me, there's
almost nobody who understands that yet, although I think they will
in time.
DNA is leading us there. I think they're leading us in that
direction, and eventually these things will occur to people. Now,
when they do, will the Test Site be available? I'm afraid it won't be,
and so that gives me grave concern.
What I'm doing here is taking an exceedingly broad view, and
I know that. Let me summarize all this up by saying, "I think we need
to look at the Test Site with much broader, much wider-angled
glasses than we have the habit of doing." I feel very strongly about
that, but unfortunately I can't convert anybody.
From the first detonations at the Test Site in 1951 until 1957,
when the first underground shots were fired, the geologic structure
of the Test Site was of little importance. There were a number of air
drops, devices were placed on towers, suspended from balloons,
fired on the surface, and two that were emplaced at the modest
depths of 12 and 67 feet. The only information about the geology
that was required was enough to allow the design of the footings for
the towers.
In the Plumbbob operation in 1957 the first underground
events were fired. It began to matter what lay beneath the surface,
for the tunnels that were being dug and the emplacement holes that
were being drilled.
Twenhofel: In the early days there were two aspects of Survey
work here. One was ground water contamination. What was the
water table like, and where was it. So there was some drilling done,
and ground water testing. The contamination of water was the
impetus for that. The other thing was mapping. There were some
early explorers who came through the country, and there were
geologists attached to them sometimes, so there was a general

knowledge of the Test Site area. There had been some mining in this
region, but there were no geologic maps. The first overall report
on the geology of the Nevada Test Site was done by two geologists
named Johnson and Hibbard, who were assigned out here with, the
Army. That was probably in about 1952. No comprehensive study
had been done until those two Army guys mapped the Test Site.
On their map they plotted the kinds of rocks that occur at the
surface. If the rocks dip at an angle, you plot on the map that dip.
You end up with a map that shows the occurrence of the various
rocks that you can see at the surface. You have to have a good base
map so you know where you are, so you can be relatively accurate
about where the various formations are. The U.S. Geological
Survey published that report later, (Geology of the Atomic Energy
Commission Nevada Proving Grounds Area, Nevada, Geological
Survey Bulletin 1021-K) when the interest in underground events
began to grow.
The first thing that happened when the underground program
began to materialize was that the USGS said, "Well, we've got to
have modern topographic maps." Those are the quadrangle maps
that are used today. So, that part of the USGS which is called the
Topographic Mapping Division flew the area for aerial photographs
and then made the topographic maps. Those were done, and the
next thing was to map the surface geology on the new topographic
maps. It was in the late 1950's to early 1960's when the geologic
mapping was done. And, they're the maps that are still used today.
Orkild: In '58 we opened an office in Denver, and that same
year they said, "Ah ha, you're a photo-geologist. We have this big
Nevada Test Site out there. We want you to analyze the western
part of it, using photos." I said, "All right," never having looked
at volcanic rocks before, but sure, we can do anything. If we can
find uranium, we can find volcanic rocks. So that's how I got
involved in Test Site work. In 1961 I joined what they called the
Special Projects Branch, which was formed to do work on the Test
Site. And then I took over and started doing photo-geologic
techniques for the mapping of the Test Site.
The USGS had been involved in '57, '58 in the tunnel work out
in the Rainier Mesa area doing some of the pioneer work for doing
shots in tunnels, and containment in tunnels. Prior to Rainier the
USGS did two high explosive shots in tunnels in Rainier Mesa.

Those were right where the miners' camp is now. They were in east
Rainier Mesa; not Rainier Mesa proper. They were a little to the
west of the Area 12 camp.
Twenhofel: The Survey shot the first contained high explosive
tests at the Test Site. There were two; ten tons and fifty tons. They
were done in Rainier Mesa, in what were called the USGS tunnels.
As far as I know, those ten and fifty ton shots were the only high
explosive tests done at that time. They were done entirely by the
USGS, for containment purposes. They were steps in scaling up to
Rainier.
Carothers: Do you recall how the USGS become involved in
detonating rather large amounts of high explosives?
Orkild: I guess they were sitting there, minding their own
business, and one day got called by somebody in the AEC who said,
"We need somebody who has experience in mining. You dig holes
in the earth, so you must know something about it." Of course,
nobody knew anything about it. Including me.
But the first reason we got involved with the Test Site was to
understand what the rocks were. And that's how the mapping
started up in the Rainier Mesa area. The USGS started mapping in
quadrangles, so to speak. The Rainier Mesa was done first, and then
it expanded from there. During the moratorium was when we did
most of the geologic mapping in the northern part of the Test Site;
Rainier Mesa, and over toward Oak Spring Butte, and the Climax
Stock. That's when the quadrangle series mapping started; it started
out to be three quadrangles. I think they're called Tippapah,
Rainier, and White Rock Spring. When we finished that we had a
big celebration and said, "Hey, we're done with the Test Site. We'll
never have to come back. We finished all this mapping, and we're
done." That was in '60 or ' 6 1 , and then, lo and behold, the
moratorium was over, and things picked up very actively.
Carothers: Do you know how it was that Rainier Mesa was
chosen for the Rainier event? Do you think it just that the mesa
happened to be there, or was there a particular geologic reason to
pick it?
Orkild: Well, I think both. I think it was there, it was a nice

mesa, and it had very mineable rocks. I don't think anybody worried
about the physical properties of the rocks; it was just a place to put
a hole in the ground. The tuffs are easy to mine; they're very
competent, they hold up quite well, and you can make a tunnel in
them very easily. It's easy mining really, better than mining in very
hard rock.
By 1957 the USGS had a role at the NTS that has continued to
the present time. Both Los Alamos and Livermore have had a
continuing involvement with the Site, and both of the Laboratories
established organizations with people permanently stationed in
Nevada. However, the USGS did not.
Twenhofel: None of us ever moved to Las Vegas. There was
a lot of pressure from the AEC to move the USGS group, because
it was a fairly sizable group as things developed in underground
testing, but we resisted that. Jim Reeves was the Manager, from
Albuquerque, and he tried to exert pressure to have the USGS
group move here. Studies were made about the costs of air travel,
and per diem, and so on, but the move never came about. It was
not the people who resisted; the organization resisted. The USGS
is somewhat paranoid about becoming beholden to outside money.
We do take it, but we're going to keep our independence and our
objectivity. There was a real fear that if this group, assigned to work
at the Test Site, would go there and be officed near or in the AEC,
the people in it might lose their independence and their objectivity.
That's a strong feeling in the USGS. So we never moved down here;
we commuted and lived at Mercury.
At one time we had one person stationed here, and we rotated.
We had a liaison office, you might call it. The guys would come
down here for a month and be in the liaison position, but it just
didn't work. That person had no authority.
Jenkins: Since 1966 I have put my roots down on the Test
Site. I think the geologic work at the Test Site is fantastically
interesting. There are very few places where so much drilling has
been done, and so much data have been collected. There are a lot
of concepts being developed as a result of the exploration at the
Site. That is what makes it a really fascinating place to work.
In the Flats there are about nine hundred holes that have given
information we can use. Up on the Mesa, perhaps a hundred.
Nowhere else in the world do you have a buried volcanic caldera
with that much exploration. It's just unreal. Nobody else can afford
it.
Carothers: Probably not. Well, the Department of Energy
hasn't done that just for you geologists, out of the goodness of its
heart. Do you get a good amount of information out of those holes?
]enkins: Oh yes. And as time goes on, more information is
gotten out of them. When I first got here we were getting caliper
logs and drill-hole bit cuttings; occasionally some core. That was
about it. Now we know something about the magnetic properties
of the rock. We have good information on the density of the units,
in situ, and of course the electrical resistivity logging has developed
as time has gone on, but we don't really use all that we could of that.
We can get the in-situ water contents now. There's the thorium-
potassium ratio from the logs, and in our work that helps in
determining which units have clay. The technology has developed
by leaps and bounds since I got here. It's a real opportunity.
Carothers: From the point of view of the person selecting a site
for an event, it appears that you could consider the Test Site as made
up of three general areas. There's the Yucca Flat area, which is deep
alluvium over tuffs, there's Rainier Mesa, which has extensive layers
of tuffs, and then there is Pahute Mesa, which has various lava flows
throughout.
Orkild: That's correct.
Carothers: How would you describe Rainier Mesa?
Orkild: It's a mesa of layered volcanic rocks. They were laid
down essentially horizontally; some by water and some by air, and
compacted into a very cohesive mass of rock.
Off to the west there were a couple of volcanos, and they were
spewing ash and debris out. Some of that was flowing with the wind
and settling out as dust. Other material that was blown up further
came down as big clots, and some came down as hot glowing ash.
These volcanos were to the west of the Test Site proper, over in what
we call the Timber Mountain area, but the actual source for those
rocks we don't know. There were never actual lava flows on Rainier,
because it's too far away from the sources.
The later rocks, like the Rainier Mesa tuff, came from the
Timber Mountain Caldera. The Grouse Canyon tuffs came from the
Silent Canyon Caldera. Those calderas are very close — only ten,
twenty miles away. On Pahute Mesa you're very close to the
sources of all of the lavas, so you do have flows and pillows — one
going out to the west, one going to the east, some going to the
south, some going over the top of others, and so on.
What you're looking at in Rainier are the outflow sheets from
those volcanic features. Some of the material rolled and surged
down the mountainside, and came to rest in the place where Rainier
Mesa is today. Time went on, and some thirteen, fourteen million
years ago, maybe ten, Yucca Flat started to subside, and left Rainier
Mesa as a high monolith, essentially as you see it. Its formation was
accelerated by erosion, and the cliffs formed, and the rocks from the
face fell into the flats. In Yucca, the faults that go down through the
valley occasionally move over time, and form scarps, and the valley
spreads a little more and settles some more. It is still moving today.
Carothers: On Rainier Mesa there is a layer of hard rocks - - the
cap rock. Is that why Rainier Mesa is there?
Orkild: That's right. It has preserved Rainier Mesa itself, being
a hard rock. Essentially what the Rainier Mesa cap rock is doing is
protecting the very vitric, soft Paintbrush Tuff beneath it. Now,
that cap rock, the Rainier Mesa member, has a lot of vertical
fractures in it, due to the way it was formed. As it cooled, it shrunk
and formed into square blocks and polygonal blocks, and that's very
typical of that type of rock unit deposit. You see the same thing on
Pahute Mesa. You would see the same thing beneath Yucca Flat, if
you could see through the alluvium. It is what happened to any of
the units that are welded, or have some form of welding. They start
as a very hot layered mass, which sticks together and compacts, and
then as it cools it cracks.
Carothers: There have been a number of tunnels that have
been mined into Rainier. Are they all being put into the same block
of material?
Orkild: Essentially. They're all in the Tunnel Beds. There are
very different units in the Tunnel Beds, but essentially they are all
the same rock types. Except P tunnel, which is much higher in the
stratigraphic section. It's up in what we call the Paintbrush, which
is above the Tunnel Beds. But I don't think those tuffs are very
different. The physical properties are very, very similar. The
porosity might be higher in some of them, especially as you get into
the upper units that are not as welded, not as altered. This is also
true of any event down in Yucca Flat, or in Pahute.
Carothers: What are Paleozoic rocks?
Orkild: They are the older rocks that form the basement of the
Yucca Flat, and the whole Test Site, essentially. They are the
limestones, or the dolomites, or the shales. They were there before
the volcanos — many, many millions of years before the volcanos.
Carothers: There might have been a time when I could have
walked around on them. What would they have looked like?
Orkild: Just like the Rocky Mountains. And then there were
the eruptions which filled the various valleys and troughs.
Carothers: In Yucca Flat, are the tuffs below the alluvium the
same rocks that are in Rainier Mesa?
Orkild: Essentially. The tuffs have exactly the same strati-
graphic sequence on Rainier Mesa as'you have on Yucca Flat. Once
upon a time they were connected. The Grouse Canyon was a layer
that was deposited probably all over Yucca Flat and Rainier Mesa.
Now you find it on the top of Oak Spring Butte, and also many
thousands of feet below in Yucca Flat.
Carothers: So, most of the things that you say about the tuff
units on Rainier Mesa should also be true of the tuff units in Yucca.
Orkild: That's correct. The alteration is very much the same.
The physical properties are very, very similar. And very likely there
are blocks just like those in Rainier Mesa.
Jenkins: Right under the alluvium in Yucca Flat is the Rainier
Mesa member, which is the same ashflow tuff that you find on
Rainier Mesa and on Pahute.
Carroll: With one exception, which is the alteration phenom-
enon. That stuff has been there for twelve, fourteen million years.
Having been there that length of time, there's another imprint that
goes upon the rock. That's the effect of moisture, and of heat.
There is water coming down and creating accessory minerals — the
clays, and the zeolites. And although one argues in certain places
that this is Tunnel Bed A, and that is Tunnel Bed A, in Area 3 it may
not be altered as opposed to the bed in Area 9. Stratigraphy to me
has always been a problem, because 1 don't like people to tell me the
name of a rock. Like "metasediment," which is a popular term, I
think, in the Soviet Union now. That name means nothing to me
as a geophysicist. What is it? Tell me the density, tell me the
porosity, tell me something more than a name you've made up.
Rambo: In terms of material properties, those rocks beneath
the alluvium in Yucca may have had a whole different experience
than the ones in Rainier. It's the same ashfall, but from the materials
properties view I think there are some differences. If you do shear
strength measurements on the tuffs in the tunnels, they will look
quite a bit different from the measurements we do out in the Flat.
And take the Grouse Canyon layer. Out in the Flat that means
something highly porous, and usually to us means something very
weak. In the tunnels it is a very strong, highly welded member, and
1 wouldn't say it had anywhere near the same gas-filled porosity as
in the Flats. But it's the same low density unit.
Miller: I never did consider the tuff directly beneath the
alluvium in Yucca to be the same as Rainier Mesa tuff. It drills
differently. The Rainier Mesa tuff you run into in Area 12, and
Areas 19 and 20, is one hard rock. Whatever is underneath the
alluvium in Yucca Flat is not a hard rock. It's not that much more
difficult to drill than the alluvium. The fact is, often times the
penetration rate was not that much different than the alluvium. In
Yucca, where you usually hit the hard drilling is when you hit the
Paleozoic; when you hit the limestone or dolomite. The tuff
underneath the alluvium in Yucca Flat is a different rock than you
find in Area 20.
Carothers: In Yucca, how thick is this layer of Rainier Mesa
tuff?
Jenkins: It's quite variable. On the east side of the valley it's
quite thin — maybe a hundred feet. In the thickest part of the Flat,
where the unit is thickest, probably close to five hundred feet. And
on Pahute Mesa it's very much a thousand feet thick all over. The
Rainier is the surface unit there.
Carothers: If I were to go to some place in Yucca Flat, and drill

down through the alluvium, I might be able to drill several hundred
feet into this Rainier Mesa member, and have the working point in
it?
Jenkins: Right. It's been done often.
Carothers: Well, it would seem that with the number of joints,
or cracks that is in that rock, there would be a lot of pathways for
gas to get to the top of that Rainier Mesa layer.
Jenkins: It's true they could be quite convenient pathways.
Carothers: Yucca Flat and Pahute Mesa are two very different
regions, aren't they, in terms of structure? Pahute is composed
largely of lavas, and Yucca is mostly tuffs of one kind and another,
comvered by the alluvium.
Jenkins: Yes, I agree with you, but the same generic units, from
the same volcanic centers, are in both places. And you have almost
the same rock on Rainier as caps a lot of Pahute Mesa. Now, the
stratigraphic section on Rainier is rather compressed as compared to
that on Pahute Mesa. In other words, there are units on Rainier that
are very Iithologically similar to those we find in Pahute Mesa, but
they're compressed. They aren't quite as thick. There was not as
deep a hole to fill, if you will.
Carothers: Pahute was added to the original Test Site in 1964.
Why was that area chosen, aside from the fact that it was directly
adjacent to the existing site?
Jenkins: I think the biggest factor that led to the identification
of Pahute Mesa as a testing area was the gravity data work. That
work identified low density material, at depth, in this big circular
situation. And of course, the good thinkers could look to the south
and see Timber Mountain, which is an exposed caldera. And the
good thinker said, "Well, this must be another caldera. Therefore
it has a variety of volcanic rocks at depth, instead of the Paleozoic
rocks which we find underneath Yucca Flat".
There were a number of exploratory drill holes that the USGS
did. Pahute Mesa 1 and 2, Ue20f, Ue20j - the water well, Ue 19c,
— and Ue 19b. All of them were quite deep. Ue20f was fifteen
thousand or so feet, and a lot of them went greater than five
thousand. And so, we got a pretty good picture of what we were
dealing with there.
Carothers:I think of Pahute as being a different type of

containment structure from Rainier Mesa, or Yucca Flat, because it
has layers which are very hard rock.
]enkins: The lavas. Well, the lavas are probably the only
difference, because you have densely welded ashflow tuffs in all
areas. The Grouse Canyon in the Flat is probably airfall or non-
welded ashflow. Of course, it's thin. Under parts of Rainier Mesa,
and under Pahute Mesa, it's densely welded.
Orkild: Pahute Mesa is where the lava was molten, and flowed
out from an active volcano, which was very, very close - - within
miles. Normally the hot lavas don't go more than ten miles away
from their source. Being a viscous, gooey mass, they stay very close.
They went in one direction, then that would clog up, and then they
went in another direction. That's what really generated some of the
blobbier structures.
Carothers: What's between the various lava flows on Pahute?
Orkild: Generally material that was ejected out of the volcano
asashorbrechiated rock, rock that is broken up. Ash is hot volcanic
material that is blown into the air and then cooled. The molten rock
comes out, and when it gets to the atmosphere it vesiculates into a
nice big frothy ball that becomes disaggregated, and falls back to the
surface.
The deposits that are what we call airfall, dropping onto the
ground, will form a very thin rind. Normally what you will see if you
have any extreme topography between various flows is that the rains
have washed this airfall material into gullies and other low spots.
Many times you can see peculiar dips on the Mesa, and they are on
those slopes where the material has been deposited, and then
washed off.
Carothers: There would be considerable differences in the
properties of the material in the lava flows, and in those places filled
with the ash, wouldn't there? Density differences, for example.
Orkild: Sure. The lavas could be very dense, and the ashflows
could be very low density. There are a number of density contrasts,
especially going out of the very dense lavas into the very vitric tuffs,
back into dense rock, back into soft rock, and then back into hard
rock.
Carothers: In Yucca, which in a sense is a somewhat less

complex structure, people took a lot of logging data and sample
data, but in the first years they didn't do all of that on Pahute. The
geologists would say, "Well, the properties are extrapolated in."
How can you go to a structure like Pahute, which has pillows of lava,
and many kinds of layers, and do that?
]enkins: Because on Pahute Mesa the units have better
identification, and therefore a unit there, a subunit, whatever, can
be projected much better under Pahute Mesa than it can be on the
Flats where you really don't have that good a handle on what the
units are.
Carothers: Is that another way of saying that the units on
Pahute Mesa are so different, one from the other, that you can see
them readily?
Jenkins: Yes. The units are so different, one from another, that
they can be easily distinguished one from another. That's a good
statement. In the Flats you have the fallout of all of this volcanic
activity, and it's just very hard to distinguish among them. Now of
course, that depends on what kind of a scale you want your physical
properties on. If it's a very wide scale, then the whole unit between
the Timber Mountain tuff and the Paleozoic rocks could be gener-
alized. On Pahute you'd have to have parts of it here, and parts of
it there, and other parts of it over there in order to make that
statement.
Orkild: I think that, as far as we're talking about the physical
parameters, there's no longer a difference in the data gathering. It's
true that most of the physical properties were extrapolated from the
key fifteen exploratory holes that were drilled up there. You saw
the same type of unit in the next hole, and said, "AH right, this is
very similar. Therefore we'll extrapolate." And there was really
nothing wrong with that. It was very successful for thirty-four
events.
Carothers: That depends on with whom you want to argue.
There are some who might say, "Yes, but all of those events were
high enough in yield to be the kind of shots that don't leak. You're
just lucky that you only shoot high yield shots in that very complex,
little known, variable density medium. You try to shoot low yield
shots, as you do in Yucca, who knows what would happen? At nine
hundred feet or so for a ten kiloton shot, it might not be the same.
Orkild: 1 would be very nervous with something like that,

because of the Rainier Mesa tuff unit that's at the surface there.
That Rainier Mesa material has cooling cracks all through it. It
cooled as one unit. It came out in multiple flows, but it all stacked
up, very thick, and compressed. As it cooled, the cracks formed in
the vitrophyre in maybe a different pattern than they formed in the
upper part of it, but those cracks are essentially through-going.
That layer is about a thousand feet thick, and that means those
fractures go down that far. Once you drop below that layer, unless
you're near a fault you have very few fractures of that kind.
Carothers: Then if I shoot at sixteen hundred feet or so, I'm
only a few hundred feet below that layer. I don't have to go very
far to get to those fractures. And then the gases can move rather
freely through the fractures, even if any single one doesn't extend
all the way through the unit.
Orkild: That's right, if you only have the Rainier Mesa member
as the rock at the top. That's in Area 19. When you go over into
Area 20, you have other units above the Rainier. The events where
you see late-time gas seepage are mostly over in Area 19, and they
are directly related to whether the Rainier Mesa layer was near the
surface. West of there, other units, the Thirsty Canyon and the
other ashflows, sit on top of it, and those cracks are essentially
sealed off at the upper part. Late-time gases certainly came up into
them somewhere, but they didn't get to the surface because they
could disperse into those thin, very porous layers that were inter-
tongued with denser units.
One of the features of the Test Site that has been considered as
possibly adversly affecting the probability of successful containment
are the faults that occur throughout the site. Generally the faults
with substantial displacements are avoided - - when they are known.
Some faults, such as the one known as the Carpetbag fault, are not
detected until some movement occurs as a result of a nearby
detonation. How dangerous faults are with respect to containment
is largely unknown, and is a matter of individual judgment.
Carothers: At the Test Site there are many faults, cracks that
show that movement has taken place.
Orkild: Yes, many of them, some with up to forty meters of

displacement in Rainier Mesa, where we can see them in the tunnels.
That's a large fault for Rainier Mesa, and it would probably be the
largest that you'll see there. And you do see displacements down
to inches in the tunnels. In Yucca there are faults with much more
displacement than that, but on those the displacement has to be
inferred from seismic surveys and exploratory holes. Normally
when you see a fault it's not one fault plane, but a series of fault
planes that might make up a total displacement of maybe ten feet,
distributed on five or six of these faults.
These faults are held very tightly together by the overburden.
There are no open standing fractures. They are a plane of weakness,
but 1 don't think they're a plane of transport. I don't think faults
necessarily have to be bad for containment, but I think the system
should be aware of them, and plan accordingly.
It would be nice to be able to try a shot on the Yucca fault.
Many years ago, on Pahute Mesa, there was an event very close to
a structure over in Area 20. That was back in the Rae Blossom days.
He said, "Let's try it. Let's see what happens." Nothing happened.
The fault moved very nicely, very handily, something like five or six
feet. But there was no reason to think it affected the containment.
There was no release.
Carothers: The closest shot to the Yucca fault that I can
remember was in '72. It was called Oscuro, which was a Los Alamos
shot fired on the east side of the Yucca fault, fairly close.
Orkild: And close to a very large northeast fault. My personal
feeling is that it would have vented if it hadn't collapsed when it did.
I remember going out and looking at the post-shot effects, and I
said, "I don't know how this thing stayed in the ground." Every-
thing was standing open. The fracture that broke to the northeast
was standing open a good foot and a half or two feet at the surface,
beyond where the collapse had occurred. That northeast fault is in
tension, and that's the thing that would stand open, because there's
nothing to close it up. I think that was a very, very close experience.
The only thing I think that saved it was the collapse. If that had sat
there for any length of time, I think we'd have been hit.
Carothers: How do you know whether a fault is under
compression or is in tension?
Orkild: In certain cases I think we know based on the overall

structure. When we look at some of the northeast trending faults
off the Yucca Fault, we can say that very likely they are in tension
— they're pulling apart. That's how the basin-range formed in the
first place. There are areas within the Test Site that are under those
conditions. That's based on the physical parameters that they have
found on drilling on the Mesa, finding out the principal stress.
Carothers: You mentioned the east side of the Yucca fault as
an area that is in tension. Does that mean the west side is in
compression?
Orkild: No. They both could be under compression, because
one side is coming up, and the other is going down, and they're both
pushing together. It's the subsidiary faults that come off of the
Yucca fault that are being pulled apart.
The upside of the Yucca Fault has always been steered away
from because you see all of these open, standing fractures, which
means that something has to be under tension and it's pulling apart.
You would assume that some of the downside would be under
compression because it's being pushed down. But there's another
wrinkle to the Yucca Fault — it also has lateral motion. One side
is moving laterally with respect to the other, and as you have that
motion you can have tension along those northeast fractures.
Carothers: Would this same situation obtain up on Rainier
Mesa, where you might have tension and compression areas? It's
not a very big block.
Orkild: It's not a very big block, and probably what it's doing
is that all of it is moving radially toward it's edge. That's the way
you would think it would happen — that it would move toward the
open-faced surface, toward Yucca or toward Pahute Mesa.
Carothers: Bill, you have said many times over the years that
you don't see that faults really cause a containment problem, and
they don't concern you particularly.
Twenhofel: I don't think faults are a problem unless they move
on the shot.
Carothers: How am I going to know whether that will happen
or not?
Twenhofel: Well, we don't really know that too well, but we

know which ones have moved on past shots. The Yucca fault, for
instance, moves quite a bit, and there are others. We try to avoid
those because we have the concept, and I think it's valid, that a fault
isn't a perfect plane, so when they do move there may be openings
created, and that's a possible release path if you're near enough.
So 1 concur with the idea of avoiding the Yucca fault, because
it moves. But many of the faults are not going to move. There are
two kinds of faults. There are tectonic faults that are created by
earth stresses, and they tend to be big things. Then there are a lot
of subsidence and compaction faulting that only occurs because the
rock is compressed a little bit here by the weight of the overlying
rock, and so it subsides a little bit — there's a little fault. Those
things don't move, and I don't think they're a factor.
I think that if a fault goes right through the stress cage it's going
to be compacted and tightened right there, so it can't possibly be
a path. When it's farther out where it can move, I think it can be
a factor, but 1 don't get alarmed by many of these faults. But we
can't be very quantitative about it. It's very subjective.
Weart: Well, Pin Stripe was an early vertical line-of-sight pipe
shot that vented through a fault. It was conducted in Area 5, and
rather than being in a drill hole, it was in a shaft that had been
excavated. It had the latest in closures; ball valves, HE closures,
everything. But, as we found out when we did an investigation after
it vented in a very massive way, all those features had been
circumvented. There was a fault that came into the shaft below
these features, and it provided an easy release path to the surface.
Carothers: The release was through the fault itself?
Weart: Yes, we know it was. It was a very clear example. When
we reentered the top of the line-of-sight pipe the seals were closed,
and it was clean. And we could trace the fault path on the surface
of the ground.
It wasn't a fault that released material directly from the cavity,
and I'm not sure that the Baneberry fault did either, although on
Baneberry the fault was much more closely associated with the
cavity than the fault on Pin Stripe. Whether or not Pin Stripe would
have contained if the fault hadn't been there I can't say for sure, but
it certainly was the easiest path. The shaft was clean above that
point.
Carothers: There are people who say, "The geology at the Test
Site really doesn't matter as far as containment goes, except in
exceptional circumstances. We have fired so many shots that we've
probably encountered just about every kind of material and situa-
tion that you can imagine. If it mattered it would have got us by
now." I emphasize they mean that statement only with respect to
the Test Site, not the world in general.
Orkild: I agree that if you bury shots deep enough you don't
have any problems.
Carothers: Well, that's true, I think. If you have all the money
you want, and all the time you want, you can certainly do that. But
coaxial cable is expensive. Casing is expensive. Drill holes are
expensive. And when you get down below the water table it begins
to get very expensive. So, that's the kind of statement that is true,
but it's not very helpful in the real world. But certainly we have
encountered many different kinds of geologic situations, wouldn't
you say, on those many shots that haven't leaked?
Orkild: Yes, but there are certain combinations of geologic
conditions that can get you. Baneberry is an example.
Rimer: Take Barnwell. There was a case where the containment
lore about geology doesn't matter came close to being disproved.
John Rambo was the containment scientist. It scared him enough
that he had people go there and take cores, and measure strength.
I'm sure he got a lot of flak. He did a number of calculations, and
we did hydrofracture calculations, and everything said that the thing
was going to be contained. We came to the CEP with that
information, and I forget who, but somebody said, "We've never
had a problem with a shot of this size at that depth of burial.
Therefore, we don't need to listen to these calculations."
The bottom line was, the thing was going to be contained, but
it was going to be contained with the potential for a hydrofracture
going much higher in the section that we had ever hypothesized
before from a tamped event. I emphasize tamped event, rather than
a cavity event.
Based on drilling rates ]ohn knew there was something funny,

and what was funny was, you had this strong material right above the
shot, which kept the cavity size small, and therefore kept the cavity
pressure up. Above that material was a layer of weaker material
which wouldn't support a high residual stress. So you had high
cavity pressure, and low strength rock above. That's the worse
possible case you could have, other than an open fracture leading
to the surface. The empiricist said, "Why should this matter?"
Well, when it was shot, radiation got very quickly up to the last plug.
Carothers: Higher than we've ever seen it on a shot of that
yield.
Rimer: And you know what? It wasn't a coincidence. Geology
mattered.
Brownlee: I think what I've learned is that the geology is
only important when I'm on the edge. Then it becomes important.
But if I've got normal margins of safety, the geology can be almost
anything. I know that's true, because we've shot in almost any
geology, safely. If you've done your containment right, you don't
have to hang on the geology to determine what happens. But if
you've done things wrong, a trivial thing in the geology can make
all the difference.
Now, don't misunderstand me — I just believe that we ought
to be so conservative that geology never matters, and most of the
time that's true. We are so conservative that the geology doesn't
matter. And so, I get very bored when they go into details that are
of no importance to this shot; none whatsoever. But they go into
it because after all, they've done this work, and they've got this
geologic business to talk about. Well, they don't understand why
it isn't important, and there's no way I can teach it to them. They
have to learn it themselves.
Orkild: Many times, I agree that you could ignore all the
geology; many, many times the geology is benign. That is, you have
flat beds, you have low water content, you have good porous rock.
There is no nearby structure that would affect the containment.
And, a rock type where we have a good handle on the physical
properties, and they are well within the range that we are familiar
with. And the water content, the same thing; it's within a range that
we know for this particular lithologic unit that's being tested in.
And that there's no large body of clay at the working point.
Carothers: We've never seen a large body of clay, except for

the Baneberry site, have we?
Orkild: There was the site for the Stutz event that had a pretty
large volume of clay. I think there has to be a particular set of
circumstances to get a big pod of clay. On Baneberry there was
opportunity for a large amount of water moving through the
formation, and the right Iithology that could alter, and a thick zone.
You've got to have water, and you've got to have a vitric tuff that
will readily turn to clay, and the right chemical conditions to start
the process.
We've seen that situation twice. I don't think that any other
time we have drilled into a situation like that. Normally the clay we
see is at the interface between two units, which is stratigraphic, and
very, very thin. Theoretically, in a long strike it could get thicker,
but not more than ten feet or so.
Carothers: On Baneberry that clay was what, a few hundred
feet thick?
Orkild: Yes. It would be very nice if we could excavate that and
see what it really looked like. We've looked on outcrops and looked
for situations like that. Where would you go to look, to see if you
could find a situation like that? There should be an analogue at the
surface somewhere. The closest we could find to something like that
was in what they call a chinle formation on the Colorado plateau,
That was essentially volcanic ash that was deposited in a shallow
ocean or pond, and altered. It's hundreds of feet thick. But we
never have we seen anything like that on the Test Site.
Carothers: With data from the hundreds of drill holes that are
on the Test Site you must be able to plot everything everywhere,
from hole to hole.
Orkild: Yes, we have 2-D and 3-D programs where we can do
that. We call up the data base and plot the holes. That's how we
do the siting. The program looks at a site and plots the geology, the
water table, the Iithologic units, and plots in the known faults, and
their distance.
The Laboratory people come in with a set of coordinates, and
the parameters for the hole. We plug that into the program and
crank out what they call a prediction report. And then we do the
same thing with the gravity. We show what the configuration of the
Paleozoic surface will be, and send it on to the Labs. That eventually
gets incorporated into the prospectus and the presentation.
Sometimes we reach a point where we do not agree. Or we
might point out certain problems, like a lava mass being close to the
site. We went through one of those in Area 2 0 , where the two
exploratory holes drilled did confirm there was a blob out there. It
turned out that it wasn't really any problem, because it turned out
to be far enough away.
Of course, as the hole is drilled you develop more data. It's
an ongoing process. Now, I think, they've gone overboard, and
collect data that nobody seems to understand. Especially water
content. We here still think something's fishy between the results
of the two water content logs - - the epithermal neutron logs that
Livermore is showing these days, and the one they used to show.
Carothers: Why?
Orkild: It has to do with the bound water. It's hard to tell
which standard to use, because the Lab seems to pick the one that
fits best. Which is Okay, I guess, but that really doesn't solve the
problem of understanding why you have this bound water and
additional water. The water contents on Pahute are up what — ten
percent more? — than we ever used in the projections. On some
of the recent shots where they're using the new logs, the water
contents are up in the twenty's — twenty-five percent, twenty-four
percent. Which might be real, but we really don't know. This is one
of the outgrowths of all the data gathering that's been going on.
Carothers: These new numbers are coming from the neutron
log aren't they?
Orkild: Yes, and I think it's a positive step. But 1 think it's
going to take a lot more work before they really understand it, and
everybody agrees with it. Of course, getting everybody to agree will
probably never happen, but you could certainly get to where a
majority agreed.
Hydrology
Fenske: Hazelton Nuclear Science Corporation got a contract
to do hydrologic studies on the Test Site in 1962. Hazelton had two
labs for work with radioisotopes; a pretty high level lab, and a low
level one. They they were doing all kinds of things for the Atomic
Energy Commission, and the National Institute of Health, and
people like that who were interested in radioactivity. They were
hiring people, and in about 1 965 I went to work for them. The
program was to find out whether underground testing was going to
contaminate ground water in such a way that it would cause a serious
problem. I don't recall what a "serious problem" would have been
at that time, but I think it came out that it would be if any
radioactivity would leave the Test Site.
Where was the water going to go? Nobody really knew very
much about the transport of radioactivity in ground water, and not
too much was known about hydrology, in that sense. At that time
hydrology was centered around how much water could be produced
from a well. So, hydrology was drilling a hole into an aquifer, and
producing water so you could water the livestock, or irrigate the
field, or something like that. That was the hydrology the USGS was
steeped in at that time. It was always drilling holes and finding out
how much water could be produced.
To do that, in the final analysis what you really do is pump on
the well. In a nice isotropic, homogeneous medium the production
is an exponentially decreasing curve. You plot it on semi-log paper,
and it's a straight line. When the line comes out so many years in
the future going to zero production, you know that's it - - that's the
end of that well, probably. Of course that assumes things are
isotropic and homogeneous and all those nice things. Which they
never are, but that's about as good as you can do. The longer you
run the pumping test the more confidence you have in the results,
but, as on some of the wells at the Test Site that the USGS tested,
you can find that the slope of the curve changes. It goes along
nicely, and all of a sudden it starts diving. It has what they call a
boundary effect.
So, hydrology was a developing field, from the point of view
of transport of water for a long distance. It started out with the idea
that there is an aquifer, there's a gradient in the aquifer, and
therefore the water is moving down the gradient at a certain rate.
Essentially you drill a couple of holes, and if the water comes up to

a certain level in one hole, and comes up to a lower level in another,
you figure there's a hydraulic gradient in that direction. Early on,
people tried to figure what the hydraulic gradient was, and what the
direction was, and what the permeability was so they could say,
"This contamination is going to go in that direction, and will travel
this far in so many years."
As things progressed, people realized that the hydrology in an
area wasn't that simple. The Test Site is not at all simple; it has a
very complex hydrology, and we still don't know much about it,
really. And, radionuclides are adsorbed on rocks. Then we found
out that the process isn't really symmetrical; they weren't desorbed
at the same rate they were adsorbed, and things like that. All kinds
of problems like that occurred, but it didn't change the basic
conclusion. That was, except for the tritium, the radionuclides just
weren't moving very much. At least that was so for the rocks we
were dealing with.
Now, the carbonate aquifers are different, because things like
strontium and calcium are ionically similar, and strontium will move
in the carbonate aquifers. In the alluvium you just didn't find any
real movement of that material. In alluvium we never have found
movement, except for the tritium, which moves as fast as, or maybe
faster than the average velocity of the ground water.
Carothers: How can something in the water move faster than
the average velocity of the water?
Fenske: Well, you try to calculate the velocity of the water on
the basis of the pore structure and the permeability, which are the
two things you have to have to get the velocity of the water. That's
an average value for the movement of the water in the aquifer.
Now, that aquifer extends over a broad region, and there may be
localized regions where the pore structure is different from the the
one you used to calculate the average velocity. An old, buried
stream bed, for example. If you happen to drill into that when you
are measuring the movement of the tritium, you might find a faster
velocity than you have calculated as an average. So, it's not that
easy. The velocity of diffusion depends on pore size, and the pores
can be of different sizes in different places, so it gets to be complex.
Carothers: One of the things I have heard about the Test Site,
which is said to be unusual, is that the water table is very deep, that
there are very few places where you will have to go down 1600 feet
before you get to the water. Is that true?
Fenske: Well, if you're talking about Yucca Valley, yes. If
you're talking about Pahute Mesa, no. On Pahute the water is pretty
far down, but very often in regions at higher elevations you will find
deeper water. In lower regions, like Yucca Valley, you find
shallower water. In fact, a lot of valleys in Nevada have swampy
areas in them. Ruby Marshes is a good example. Or they have
springs; Hot Creek Valley has springs. That would be the normal
situation. But in Yucca Valley it's different.
I had one of the fellows at DRI, a number of years ago, draw
a map of the elevation of the water in all of the valley bottoms in
Nevada. The reason for this was because I felt if I had the elevation
of the water in all the valley bottoms I would have an idea of what
the regional flow structure looked like in Nevada. Well, you find
everything is very regular, and it all moves down towards Death
Valley — until it hits the Test Site, where Yucca Valley is. Then,
there are very steep gradients going into Yucca Valley. There's
something else going on; Yucca Valley is underlain in many areas by
the carbonate rocks, which are fractured, and transmissive of water.
Another thing you have in Yucca is that the alluvium has a
higher water saturation, higher in the section, than you would
expect in a dry valley. All the way to the surface you have some
water saturations that are higher than you normally would expect.
In some places you find 20, 30, 40 percent water saturations; much
higher than you would expect to see if the water was always down
at the level where it is now. The impression you get is that at one
time the water was up near the surface, but now it isn't any more.
What I think has happened is that the carbonates which
underlie the valley have acted as a huge drain. So, the water is
basically moving down to the carbonate, and out to the springs in
Amargossa. The water in all the rest of the Nevada area is moving
in sort of a normal fashion; in Yucca it's being drained, and has been
drained, so It's not up near the surface anymore. It's down closer
to the level of the water in the Amargossa.
If you look at the vertical gradients in the carbonate, they are

much less than the vertical gradients in the alluvium, so the normal
direction of movement would be downward through the alluvium
into the carbonates in the Yucca valley. Then the water moves south
through Frenchman out to the springs in the Amargossa Desert.
Some of the water beneath Pahute may be draining into Yucca,
but whether it is or not is the subject of some argument. The Survey,
which has done most of the work on that, think that the Eieana
formation, which comes along the side of Yucca Valley, on the east
side of Pahute, is a pretty effective barrier to movement into Yucca
Flat. Everything that comes off the west side of Pahute Mesa goes
down underneath Forty Mile Canyon toward Lathrop Wells. So, not
much of any water gets into Yucca from Pahute. Some probably
does, but I think it would be small.
I don't think there's any recharge at all in Yucca. We ran an
investigation there once where we looked at tritium in the dirt. It's
pretty dry dirt, and it's pretty hard to dig it. I guess about the
farthest they could reach was about as far as you could reach with
your hand to grab a handful of dirt. We found that the amount of
tritium pretty well decreased with depth, so there doesn't appear to
have been any recent recharge there. By the time you got down
about a meter you just didn't find any tritium any more, in the dirt.
There was a lot of tritium in the rain in the sixties from the
atmospheric tests; there was a peak during those years. You don't
find that at depth when you look at it in Yucca valley, or on the
slopes around the valley. So, I don't think there's much recharge
going on there. I don't think it's going from the surface of the valley
down 2000 feet.
Now, it may reach an equilibrium point where the gradient
around the sides of the valley is increased enough to replenish the
water about as fast as it's running out. There are steep gradients
going down into the valley, and the lower you make the water, the
steeper those gradients get, and the more water you bring into the
valley from the sides. It may have reached an equilibrium point, but
I don't know if it has or not. You'd have to watch for a long time,
a hundred years, or two hundred years, to be able to tell.
Carothers: A few years ago, in the LANL area, radioactivity
was found when they were drilling an emplacement hole. There was
the thought that perhaps this activity had been transported from the
expended Sandreef or Aleman sites, to the north. If that was so, it

had traveled laterally a lot further than people had expected. What
do you think accounted for the transport that was observed? It did
happen.
Fenske: Yes, it did. There are a lot of things we can't explain
that we see once in a while. The only thing I can think is that there
was pressure in the cavity, and material was driven down a fracture
that momentarily opened up. As I recall, there were some
radionuclides out there that had gaseous precursors, and they
wouldn't have gotten that far if they hadn't been shoved over by a
pulse of gas, or something like that.
Generally, the water above the carbonates, in the allluvium and
the tuffs, drains down. It is when it gets into the common aquifer
that it drains to the south. 1 would think that the amount of lateral
transport, above the carbonates, is pretty small. That doesn't mean
there can't be some, but I think it's pretty small.
Carothers: On another subject, what is perched water?
Fenske: Well, it's something that you may well have in Yucca
valley, if once you had a higher water table and now you have a
lower water table. Say that a thousand years ago you had a water
table close to the surface. If that water table drops, there will be
water left in various places — on top of layers of less permeable
material, for instance. That water is just sitting up there — perched
up there. It is not like a lake; it's just a more saturated region of the
rocks.
In the conventional sense of perched water, you'd be in a more
humid region than the NTS, and you'd have a water table at some
level. The water that's deposited on the surface infiltrates down.
But, there may be some fairly shallow little clay lenses. So, some
of that water sits on top of these clay lenses. Then it runs off the
edges, and down to the water table, but there's a time delay. In that
situation, given a certain amount of rainfall on the average, there's
always a lens of water that's perched up there on top of this clay
lens. It's in equilibration between the amount of water that's
running off the edges of the lens, and the amount of rainfall that
deposited.
Carothers: Perched water was one of the things that was

discussed in the first report about what happened on Baneberry.
The impression was given that the explosion cracked a rock layer,
and a lot of water ran into the cavity. In the situation you describe,
that couldn't happen.
Fenske: No, it couldn't. At least not rapidly, not in minutes.
It might do it in months, or years, or decades, or something like
that, depending on the permeabilities of the materials.
Carothers: What about "water mounds," that are thought to be
produced by nuclear detonations?
Fenske: You will get Fenske's version, which is that I don't
really believe in water mounds. I do believe in potential mounds.
What I mean by that is, in material which has a low permeability,
such as the alluvium, the water maybe moves ten feet a year when
it's moving laterally. I don't think that, instantaneously, you can
move huge volumes of water up meters in height over big areas. I
think that what happens is that the relationship between grain
pressure and pore pressure is changed.
Say you drill a hole down into the formation, and measure the
water level. After the shot you have a higher pore pressure there
than you had before; so the water comes up to equalize that pore
pressure. And so, every place you drill a hole you have water
coming up to higher levels than it did before the shot. You can say
you have a water mound there, but it's not the water that's a mound
— it's a potential mound. What you are really measuring is the
potential of water in that formation at that point. Now, the water's
flowing, because of the gradients and the higher potentials, from
one place to another. But it's not a real mound of water. The holes
you are drilling are really acting as piezometers; they're measuring
the water pressure at that point, which is higher than you would
consider at that depth, or higher than it was before. There really
isn't any more water there than there was before. It's just that the
pressure, in the water, is higher than it was before the shot, so the
water just comes up higher in the piezometer tube that you have put
in there. And that's because, in shaking the ground, you have
transferred the grain pressure to pore pressure.
The material is originally in an equilibrium situation, where all
the sand grains are impinging on one another, and they hold the
pores open to a certain degree. If you took all the water out, there
would still be some pores in there. Now, if you shift the sand grains
a little bit, they can go together and reduce the porosity. Then,
because you have reduced the porosity, there isn't the space for the
water that there was before, but there's still the pressure of the
overlying rocks. By reducing the porosity you have increased the
pore pressure, or the water pressure in the rocks.
The same thing happens, incidently, in a landslide. You have
a water saturated material. A little shift of the grains, for one reason
or another, will start increasing the pore pressure, and decreasing
the grain pressure. When you do that you decrease the resistance
to flow; the material becomes liquefied, and downhill it goes.
Spontaneous liquefaction is basically that kind of a mechanism.
You've been to the beach and patted the sands?
Carothers: Sure. And water comes up to the top.
Fenske: Yes. You're compacting the sand, and the water comes
up. When you compact it, that material becomes liquified; it
becomes mushy.
If you start calculating the amount of water that would have to
be in a water mound, given a reasonable porosity, and how much
you had to move in a fairly short period of time, that's a lot of water.
And then you have to ask, "Where did it come from?"
We have run into situations where perched water was a
consideration, and it has caused all kinds of problems. They were
not necessarily containment problems; they were problems with
emplacing the device, just getting the thing down in the hole. For
example, there have been cases where the Labs have put down a
liner, and the water has come over the top of the liner. That has to
do with hydrology, and you ought to understand more about it.
Sometimes that's a perched water problem.
Carothers: No it's not. It's a stupidity problem. They say,
"And the water level was tagged at 636 meters. So, we've put in
a liner whose top is at 636.5 meters." They seem to think that all
they need is a liner that is an inch, or a foot higher than their tag,
and everything will be swell. And then they say, "Oh my gosh, the
water is running over the top. How distressing." What I think is,
"How expensive to fix. Fire them."
Fenske: Well, there are other cases where water has run over
the top for other reasons. There is the possibility that there really
is perched water. When you go through a zone where there is water,
and it's not all necessarily held in by capillarity, it can run out. And
there are cases where there is excess pressure in the water, as in the
ground water mound. There was one shot where the water pressure
was high enough to collapse the casing, due to ground water
mounding, or the pressure in the water, as I think of it.
Carothers: So, suppose I am drilling down through the allu-
vium, and the tuffs, and it's dry. I am careful to stay above the
standing water level, but I notice water running into the hole. As
I understand it, that could happen because there's perched water,
or as you would say it, there's a high pressure zone. If I case that
hole, the casing has to be able to withstand a pressure that is at least
equal to whatever the pore pressure of that water is. If it can't do
that, it could collapse, even though that casing is above the standing
water level.
Fenske: Yes. There's another way you could have perched
water, and at the Test Site it would be water running into the valley.
If you happen to have a tongue of something like clay, that's lower
permeability, which extends into the Valley, water may run along
the top of it rather than run down to the water table. It may run
along the top, and then drip over the edge. Up to that point you
may have perched water. Around the valley sides, more than
around the center, you could possibly have perched water. You
have a source that keeps on running, because it's recharge water
from, let's say, Pahute Mesa that's coming through the system. It's
just taking a little different path. A good example of that is some
of the springs that you see. They're basically perched water. Water
enters the system, flows down some impermeable layer, and comes
out in the form of a spring where the layer intersects the surface.
Carothers: Do you think we've made any difference to the flow
of the water, or the drainage of the water? Have we upset the
hydrology of the valley?
Fenske: I don't think so, except locally, around the cavity, and
for some small distance out from that. I looked at one thing though,
at one time, which was the number of uncased bore holes that went
into the Paleozoics. There turned out to be a fairly large number.

At some level those holes enhance the flow of water from the
alluvium down into the carbonates. Of course, you have to start
with how much water is leaking through there, without the holes, to
see what that enhancement might be, and we don't know that.
147
6
Earth Materials and Their Properties
The geologic materials in which a device is detonated deter-

mine the details of the phenomenology that occurs. Hence, the
properties of these materials are required as input for any of the
codes used to calculate the expected cavity size, hydrofractures that
may occur, the various stresses that occur, the ground motions, and
so on. Unfortunately, many difficulties beset the determination of
these properties.
In emplacement holes there is no access to the materials, or
to information about the geologic materials around the shot point,
other than that provided by logging tools, or various tools which can
retrieve small samples. In the tunnels samples can be taken fairly
readily, and laboratory measurements can be made on them to
determine various quantities such as density, porosity, and water
content. However, such laboratory measurements cover only a
small range of the conditions the material is subjected to near the
detonation, and tell nothing of how the material will respond to a
shock pressure of 500 kilobars, for example, or to simultaneous
radial and tangential stresses.
Laboratory measurements are made on small, competent
samples of rock, while the energy of the detonation interacts with
the entire mass of the surrounding earth, which can include frac-
tures, faults, and layers of different materials of different composi-
tion and properties. The behavior of the overall surrounding mate-
rials may be quite different from what would be expected from the
the properites of a small laboratory sample.
Rocks that have been subjected to the high shock pressures
generated by the energy released in the detonation can be damaged,
to various degrees, depending on the shock pressure, and their
properties are not the same after the shock wave has passed as they
were before. Therefore, they do not respond as they did before, but
things important to containment are still occurring.
There is not agreement among those working in the field of
containment as to what the properties important to containment are.
Carothers: Los Alamos had drilled some holes during the

moratorium, and after the resumption of testing in 1961 that
activity picked up considerably. What sort of logging did you do,
or what kind of geologic information did you look for? Or did it just
accumulate peripherally to the actual drilling?
Brownlee: Well, I hate to go on record as saying this, but when
I was dealing with the engineers those kinds of questions had nothing
to do with it at all. They picked the sites, and told us there was a
hole there. We could ask whatever questions we chose about it, but
they were not obligated to tell us anything. The truth is, they didn't
know anything about the site.
Carothers: If you asked, "What are the rocks like at the bottom
of the hole?" Or "What sort of layers of rock have you drilled
through?"
Brownlee: No answer. Now, they very well may have had
some information, but they certainly didn't feel obligated to share
it with a non-engineer. The one fact they acknowledged was that it
was possible to hit water. And so, I usually knew if we had gotten
to the water table.
I knew the depth, of course. And if they were in tuff, they
would tell me that as opposed to being in alluvium. But I didn't
know much about tuff, because the alluvium in Area 3 is very deep.
So, tuff was not a common kind of occurrence until we got toward
the edge of the valley.
But logging was not a requirement. The only requirement was
to drill a straight hole, and so they did a lot of worrying about not
drilling crooked holes. All the emphasis was on the mechanics, on
the engineering aspects of the drilling. That's the way I remember
it.
I finally derived four standard materials, based on how close I
was to the water table. I had very dry, dry, wet and very wet. The
very dry was for the top of the alluvium in Area 3, and the very wet
was at the water table. And, I had a couple of other standard curves.
So, I found that the equations of state were some strange function
of depth, but it wasn't depth from the surface, it was really distance
from the water table.
Earth Materials and Their Properties 149
So, the question I would ask was, "Where is the water table?"
And Rae Blossom would fume and say, "You don't have to know
that. There's no reason why we should spend a dollar to find out
where the water table is. Just knock it off. What difference does
it make to you anyway? We tagged the water table at such and such
a depth over there, so that is what it is. How could it be any different
here?" And so, my questions always ended in big arguments about
non-relevant things like budgets, and time, and money, and "You're
bothering the engineers. Get the hell out of here."
I'd go have these terrible arguments with Rae, and shout and
wave my arms, and we were enemies forever, and then Rae would
go out and get the answer to my question because he would
recognize I really was serious. You see, if you didn't persevere, you
weren't serious. But if you persevered, he'd go get the information
you wanted. So, I have to admit that on a number of occasions Rae
did make an attempt to get answers to some of my questions. He
was in a position where he could order the rest of them to do it, but
it was always like pulling teeth to get that done.
So, I'm afraid that in those very earliest times we knew next to
nothing about the medium or its properties after the hole was
drilled. The guys who drilled would record that the drilling rate
changed, but you didn't know why. I only found out about some
of these things when we were actually doing the tests. Livermore
did a better job than we, because when they were doing the tunnels
they were asking the right kinds of questions. I did get permission
to go out and see what was there, and I was educated more by
Livermore guys than by people here, in the very earliest times.
Carothers: Pre-Baneberry there was, apparently, no real
requirement at Los Alamos to take logs and samples.
Scolman: I don't recall that there was. My feeling is that to
the extent that there was logging done, or we studied the lithology
of the hole, it had to do mostly with drilling. How do you best drill
it? Anything that came out in terms of geologic information was
almost incidental to that procedure. We did run some logs. We ran
caliper logs, for example.
Carothers: Because you wanted to put the casing down the
hole, and you wanted to know how much cement you would need.
Scolman: Exactly. Because you had to put the casing down,

And, of course, we ran cement logs, so we could say, "Yes, it is
cemented." We calculated how much cement we should have put
in and then made sure that it was reasonable with regard to that.
Carothers: What attention did the Livermore people pay to the
medium the event was in?
Olsen: That really didn't come until Baneberry. There were
some of us in the containment group, in '69 and '70, who started
to appreciate some things. In particular, what we looked at was
C02 content, because there was a shot that conventional wisdom
said, at that time, was deep enough, and had enough yield that it
shouldn't have leaked, but it did. That was Nash. Well, the obvious
thing about Nash was that it was in high carbonate rock. As soon
as you think about it, if you make a lot of C02, it doesn't go away,
so it just keeps pushing. So, one of the things we started thinking
about early, when there came some sensitivity about seeping, was
carbonate content. We didn't go much beyond that, although we
started to, until Baneberry.
Carothers: Was there any logging or sampling program to look
at the various media you might be shooting in?
Olsen: We did some. It was not much. I don't remember that
we did downhole sampling. We took cutting samples, as they
drilled. One of the problems, in that era, was that there were not
big-hole logging tools, which are now the standard. If you wanted
to do any geophysical logging you had to drill a small diameter hole,
so there was a lot more exploratory drilling then than there is now.
We did take cores, and we had, basically, oil field geophysical tools
to measure density and things like that. So, we had some logs then,
and there were a few people who were beginning to look at those
things. The cratering people, who were still in business at the time,
were interested in knowing densities and things like that as input to
their computational models, but they weren't interested in
containment, obviously, if they were interested in blowing a crater.
One way to determine something about the material properties
in the emplacement holes is to obtain samples of the rocks at various
depths, and to do various tests on them, in the laboratory. Such
samples may or may not be representative of the actual material, but

they are a start. Obtaining such samples is not an easy, nor
inexpensive matter, as the drillers see it.
Miller: One thing I'd like to tell you is about all the sampling
deals that came up after Baneberry. I was thinking about that when
you called and said you would like to talk with me. I thought,"I
wonder if he ever heard some of my tirades about all the sampling
we did, back then."
Carothers: All the sampling? Just those few little side-wall
samples here and there, you mean?
Miller: Yeah, just a few. In fact I wrote a technical paper on
it. It was years ago when they were designing the tool to go out and
take a side wall core, not a side wall sample. I said, "You've got to
find a way of getting this information with logs." And they finally
did. I was happy about that, because they caused us so many
problems with that sampling. Drilling the hole is difficult enough.
Preshot measurements of material properties are important in
the prediction of the behavior of the surrounding medium when the
shot occurs. Measurements on cores and samples taken after the
drilling of a hole, and downhole logging data from emplacement
holes provide some information. However, there is not uniform
agreement as to the value, or necessity, of the various kinds of data
that can, or should be obtained.
Carothers: Bill, you chaired a committee to look at various
material properties to make recommendations about which ones
were important, or how they should be measured.
Twenhofel: It goes back to Baneberry, when the properties of
the medium had a contributory effect in the release. So the system
said, "We've got to have some way to find out what's down there.
And we want to have that in numbers, we want to quantify it."
There were certain measurements that could be made at that
time. You could get samples, and you could measure the water, the
grain density, the bulk density from either samples or from logging
tools, and you could measure the carbon dioxide. Those measure-
ments are relatively easy to make. They're cheap, they're routine,
and they tell you something about the material down there. Then
you can calculate other properties, some of which may be related

to containment, like gas-filled porosity. You can do that, and it's
cheap, so you do that.
There was a committee set up at that time, and then there was
a report that said, "We are now going to collect these data, and
make these measurements. At the very least, if there are any more
surprises which are likely to cause another Baneberry, these mea-
surements will probably tell us about those surprises."
Carothers: You make it sound as though the measurement of
material properties started along the lines of, "Well, we've got to
do something. Here are some things we can do, so let's do those."
Twenhofel: Pretty close. That's the impression I'm trying to
give. And that wasn't foolish. We were scared. And there was
another thing; the physicists liked it, because they had numbers
now. And again I'm being a little facetious, but not completely.
Carothers: Well, Bill, what is a physicist going to do with
information like, "At 1326 feet there are fossilized tree trunks
mixed with gravel and sand." How do you put that into a code to
calculate anything?
Twenhofel: I know. I realize that. But anyway, that's how it
got started. Then the next thing that happened was that some years
ago you appointed a Data Needs Subcommittee for the Panel, and
I was the Chairman.
Carothers: Well, there had been a certain amount of grum-
bling, among some Panel members, who would occasionally say,
"Why are you showing me all this?" And then there was grumbling
on the part of other people who said, "I think it's absurd that you
show me data that shows a water content of 100% and a saturation
of 120%. How can there be 120% saturation? That just tells me
you don't know what you're doing. Why are you doing this?"
Twenhofel: Yes. So, that subcommittee was appointed, and
it's purpose was to look at what data was being collected to see
whether there was additional data that ought to be collected, or
whether we could stop collecting some of it. Well, we expanded
that charter a little bit to include, "What kind of data ought to be
presented to the CEP." One of our recommendations was that we
add a section on phenomenology, and a section on a discussion of
the containment aspects of the event. So, I think we made a pretty

good contribution in terms of what data ought the CEP see, and what
ought to be in a containment package.
In my personal opinion, I think we badly goofed when we failed
to eliminate much of the data we're collecting on material proper-
ties. We failed to do that. I tried, and some other members of the
Panel tried, to get some of that data eliminated, and the Labs would
not stand still for it.
Carothers: What, for example, do you think are some things
that don't need to be collected?
Twenhofel: Grain-density. Bulk density. And consequent
calculations based on them. I just don't think they are directly
relevant to containment. I think that those data do not need to be
collected. I've always thought that.
Now, I think that the electrical log is a really valuable tool
because it tells you something about whether the rock is different
from the norm, whatever the norm is. There's a norm for alluvium,
and there's norm for tuff. If there's something different, when the
electric log tells you that then you can go and look at the samples
very carefully and see whether there is a bunch of clay or not, for
example.
I think we know enough now about Yucca Flat and Pahute Mesa
that we can drill a hole, take a few simple logs, and treat those areas
just like the Sandpile. In certain places along the edges of the valley
there may be another Baneberry surprise, but we'd catch it with
simple logging. Then we could go into it in detail. This concept
didn't prevail in the Data Needs Subcommittee because of the
opposition of the Labs.
Carothers: What sort of arguments did the Labs make? You'd
think they would latch onto that and say, "Here's our chance to save
a few bucks."
Twenhofel: Well, they didn't. I think there were two reasons.
If you have numbers, and you have data, that gives you some
appearance of having done a good job. You've gone to the best of
your capabilities. Also, the calculators do like to have some of those
numbers. I'm not trying to downgrade their attitude at all; they had
a good attitude. It just differed a little bit from mine. I think it's
time to reopen the whole question of what's needed, and to look at
it again.
Carothers: Which properties do you think do matter to
containment?
Twenhofel: You ought to know the carbonate content. You
don't have to know it precisely, but you ought to know if it gets over
six or seven percent. I think you ought to know if there are some
big acoustic interfaces. The Paleozoic location is only of concern
because it's an acoustic interface. I don't see any reason to give
water content, I really don't, unless you want to know it for
coupling, and placement of instruments.
One more thing about physical properties, or material proper-
ties. I think the histograms that are presented are probably
unnecessary. We now have such a wealth of experience, since
Baneberry, with all those grain densities, water content, gas-filled
porosity, and all that, that what we say is, "Well, they're within
experience. They're within successful experience, every property."
Well, of course they are. We've covered a span now from 5% water
to 27% water, so any value we get is going to fall within our
successful experience. We're deluding ourselves with the magic of
these numbers and the histograms, in thinking that they are relevant
to anything. Again, I'm making an extreme statement to make a
point.
Carothers: Or,I could put it as, "We've shot in just about every
kind of geologic medium there is at the Test Site, and so the material
properties of a new site are almost sure to fall in the range you've
observed before."
Twenhofel: And many of them don't matter.
As contrasted to the measurement of the material properties
preshot, either in-situ or in the laboratory, measurements can be
attempted of the response of the material to the shock pressures and
motions produced by the detonation.
Bass: There was a program at Sandia that was beginning to get
started during the moratorium. Luke Vortman, Lou Perret, and AI
Chabai had a very nice program set up . They asked me if I would
be willing to go to work with AI Chabai on this, as his assistant. I
said, "Sure," and I got involved with Hugoniot determinations for

earth materials. The main thing we were going to do was write a
report on close-in effects of buried underground explosions, be they
nuclear or chemical made no difference. We wanted to look at the
pressures generated close by, the temperatures generated, whatever
was there.
Livermore was heavily involved in this kind of work through the
PNE program. Dave Lombard was doing this at Livermore. He was
doing a lot of very good Hugoniot work. Bob McQueen was doing
it at Los Alamos, and Al Chabai and I were doing it at Sandia. We
said, "Let's measure Hugoniots, let's measure elastic waves. Let's
look at granite, let's look at alluvium." Nobody wanted to look at
alluvium very much. We looked at tuff a little bit; nobody really
wanted to look at tuff. We were much more interested in oil shales,
sandstones, and things like that.
Anyway, we got going on it. We did explosive work out at
Coyote Canyon, behind Manzano. We had an explosive site out
there that I was in charge of, and I had a crew of about eight or ten.
It wasn't a big facility; it was sort of an ad hoc thing that we put
together. So we started doing this, and we were chugging along
merrily, measuring shock velocities and things like that. Mainly we
were doing Hugoniot work, and gauge development.
Carothers: What shock pressures were you trying to reach?
Bass: My job was to get as high as we could. We wanted to get
to a megabar. At that time Altschuler's work was coming out, and
Altschuler was getting up toward a megabar. Everybody said, "How
in the world is he doing it?" The answer was obvious to us all what
he was doing, but it was never in the literature. It has been finally
admitted he was using nuclear sources. He was ahead of everybody,
there's no question about that. He did some great work, and 1 think
he's still around and still doing some pretty good work. McQueen
had started doing some flyer plate work at Los Alamos, where he was
getting up towards a megabar.
It's no problem at all to get to a couple of megabars in brass,
or steels, or maybe even aluminum. Getting a geologic material up
there is a little tougher, because its impedance is so much lower. We
did the best we could; we would run flyer plates five or six inches,
and planarity was going to hell on us; we were generally using eight
inch flyer plates as plane wave generators. We evacuated the path
between the flyer plate and the target, trying to cut down on the air
shock that would build up and screw up our instrumentation. So we
would fire the things in a vacuum. We would have to glue the plates
to the explosive to keep them from bowing away when we pumped
them down. It wasn't a very good vacuum, but you certainly could
bow an eight inch plate; eighty mils was a typical thickness for the
flyer plates. We followed McQueen's work on this directly. I'd say
we were getting up to a megabar. The other high pressure work that
was being done was being done by Bill Isbell, at General Motors at
the time.
Higgins: The results of the Livermore work on Rainier, and that

work was very much focused just on Rainier, caused us to modify our
experimental measurements program. We had three or four people
who were spending a lot of time on designing measurement tech-
niques for the megabar, or many hundreds of kilobars, pressure
regime, and we dropped all of those except one confirmatory
measurement that was done on the Antler experiment in 1961.
That was done by Dave Lombard, and it is the only megabar level
active measurement that's been done on a shot.
I can remember standing up at a meeting at Rand Corporation,
in Santa Monica, and making an impassioned plea. "Please stop
spending all this money on ten megabar equations of state because
it doesn't make a bit of difference. It's all electrons anyway." And
I wasn't the only one making that argument. That point of view
prevailed, and so all that work stopped. And that was wrong. It was
a terrible mistake.
Carothers: And you talked them into it?
Higgins: Well, 1 was one of those who did. I've thought of
things I've done wrong, and that was certainly one of them. The
consequence of that decision was that the measurements program
centered on the things like Bob Bass has done for the last thirty
years, measuring stress levels in the tens to low hundred kilobar
range, where plastic failure, and brittle failure, and that kind of thing
is happening. Of course, that region is important not only for
containment purposes; it's important for structures effects pur-
poses. It's a region where the mechanical engineers are very
uncomfortable designing things like bunkers, and missile silos, and
very crucial elements of an offensive or defensive system. Whether
the stresses come from nuclear or not nuclear things, that stress
region is important. So, it wasn't totally a mistake, but it was a
mistake from the standpoint that we would today understand more
about what goes on in the explosion than we do.
Bass: 1 did not go to that meeting in Santa Monica. 1 was in
Rio that week, and if 1 had a choice, 1 would be in Rio de Janiero.
1 would say that where Gary now feels we are lacking is not
necessarily in the megabar region, but in the hundred kilobar, two
hundred kilobar regime. That's because the phase changes that are
going on in all of our native materials have been terribly handled
theoretically. The various contractors who have worked with that
have really botched that job badly.
When you get into a porous geologic material, apparently the
phase change can move down in pressure, down into the seventy or
eighty kilobar region, because of the temperature that's involved.
Alluvium does funny things. Alluvium starts expanding when you
get above a hundred kilobars when you hit it. On a Hugoniot plot
of pressure versus volume, it starts expanding when you get up
there, because you're moving back in the temperature curve. It's
a mess, and 1 don't pretend to really understand what's happening
there.
It would be nice to have data in the megabar region, but I'd
rather have them in the hundred kilobar regime. Shell Schuster,
who used to be at Livermore said, "Don't measure me another
Hugoniot, for God's sake. I can draw them." And 1 think he's right.
You can draw the Hugoniot, but you can't write the equation of
state.
I think we've got a better handle on some of these things than
a lot of people realize. There have been two decent sources of data
in recent years. The containment program has provided a wealth of
data. Frankly, I think most of it recently has come from DNA, and
Sandia. I think that's because of where they test. The DNA tunnel
events give you the opportunity to make a decent measurement,
because you can get there. You know exactly where your gauge is,
you know exactly where it's pointing, you can orient it with a transit.
You don't have to dangle it down a hole, or put it in a satellite hole.
The other great source of data has been the hydrodynamic
yield program, and this a tremendously overlooked source of data.
We got seventy-five pressure measurements in tuffs and alluviums
in the period when Los Alamos was making hydrodynamic yield

measurements. Individually they're pretty damn bad, but as a
whole they're pretty good. There's a wealth of data in there in the
500 kilobar to 10 kilobar pressure regime. There are awfully good
data on events in alluvium up to 500 kilobars. I know they're good
because I made the measurements, and I'm very happy with them.
They were not measurements of wave shape, however. They were
measures of peak pressure, and at 500 kilobars what else can you
have?
Another batch of data came from Livermore. Clyde Seismore
came up with a marvelous pressure gauge that worked in this
pressure regime. It was a bulb of plexiglass; it turns out that when
you shock plexiglass it puts out a charge. So, Clyde put this bulb
of plexiglass downhole, and he made some outstanding measure-
ments.
App: DNA has the best opportunity to look at material
properties in-situ, and at what material damage has been caused by
the shot because they can go into the tunnels preshot, and can
reenter after the shot. On a reentry they can go back in and obtain
core samples of rock that has been shocked to a kilobar, or five
kilobars. They can obtain the damaged samples, send them to Terra
Tek and have them measure the residual strength.
Carothers: And it's different from the strength of rock that
hasn't been shocked.
App: Yes it is. For the cases I have seen on reentry, the tuff
appears to damage more than the grout. Preshot, both the rock and
the grout give off a ringing sound when hit by a rock hammer. Post-
shot, the grout still rings, but the tuff gives off a dull thud. The post-
shot tuff can be pulled from the walls by hand, and it crumbles.
DNA has taken cores from damaged rock to Terra Tek, and the
failure properties they measure are way, way down. Of course, it's
a function of range. At five kilobars the damage is severe, at one
kilobar it is just beginning, and at five hundred bars it is virtually
nonexistent. Damage decreases significantly with increasing range.
As a practical matter, on the vertical shots we can't obtain such
core, so we have to estimate damage based on the tunnel rock
observations. Or we can try to pseudo-damage rocks in the
laboratory them by straining them, and determine how they weaken
with strain. You can do that up to a point, but you can't get the
really large, twenty percent type shear strains that occur in an
underground test. And, you can't replicate the strain rates either.
So, we're not really replicating what is going on in the ground with
laboratory tests.
However, with laboratory tests we can get some feeling whether
a material is going to damage easily or not. DNA has gone to a lot
of effort to try to simulate damage in the lab, but with a lab sample,
once you get a through-going shear failure, you've lost your
experiment. They can't achieve twenty percent strains, although
the people at Waterways and Terra Tek are trying. They're coming
up with new schemes, and who knows? They might be successful;
it would be very valuable to the calculational community if they
were.
Carothers: Suppose you get a sample from a tunnel location,
and you send it to Terra Tek. They say its compressive strength is
such and so. There are folks who would say, "That's the value for
a small, competent piece of material. The region the device energy
is interacting with is much larger, and that much larger volume will
have things in it like fractures, changes in porosity, and so on.
Therefore the lab measurements are not really representative of the
world the device energy is going to interact with."
App: That's right. But, for certain types of rocks apparently
that measurement is fairly representative. The Tunnel Beds tuff in
the tunnels is perhaps one of those rock types. The DNA modelers
feel that the in-situ fractures don't modify the overall properties
much from what one obtains from the small samples. The reason
they believe this is that they can put the Terra Tek test results into
their models, and replicate the outgoing shock wave fairly well.
Now, I said outgoing shock wave; late time residual stress is a
different story.
Other rock types such as alluvium and welded tuff also are a
different story. For these materials, what you're saying is absolutely
right. You cannot go from the laboratory measurements to a
calculation that agrees with the field data. This is a big problem for
us, and the approach we have taken is to start a systematic study of
events that have had a lot of free field measurements associated with
them, and infer the response properties of the rock mass from them.
Merlin alluvium is an example. The Merlin event was heavily
instrumented by Sandia. There were a lot of working point level

gauges, some horizontally out, and some vertically up from the
working point. Unfortunately, the Merlin samples are the only ones
recovered for alluvium core properties measurements, so that's the
only case where we can make direct comparison to the calculations.
We're trying to create a library of properties based on infer-
ences made from modeling, as opposed to from core. I don't know
what else to do. This approach does take into account the larger
volume. Exactly what you've said is what prompted us to take this
course of action. We do not get a unique solution from these
calculations, but the more measurements we have, the closer to
unique it becomes. So, we now have a standard equation of state
for Area 3 alluvium. It's not based on mechanical measurements,
because you can't obtain core in alluvium. If you do get core it's
only the more competent parts of the material, so it comes back to
your argument that it's not representative.
What is representative is what we see in the wave forms, and
if we can infer properties by using forward modeling techniques,
then we can come up with an equation of state for Area 3 alluvium.
When we have our next shot in Area 3 we will take those properties
from Merlin, look at the comparisons of the physical properties,
such as density, and perhaps make a few adjustments, but keep the
same basic response model. Then we will use that in the new
location where we're trying to do a site evaluation.
We're currently taking this approach with granite, for the
verification program. We have the same problem for verification.
And so, we're trying systematically to calculate a number of events.
We've been doing this for years now, as time permits. It is not
something we have recently started. There are three of us working
on this; myself, Wendee Brunish, and Jim Camm. We've calculated
some Pahute Mesa tests, and in Yucca Flat we've done a lot of work
on the Hearts event.
Carothers: I would think that Pahute Mesa would be your most
difficult area. On Pahute you have fairly soft layers of ashfall or
ashflow rocks, and you have pillow of lavas, so you have hard layers
and soft layers. All of those presumably interact with the outgoing
wave. How do you handle that?
A p p : It's a difficult problem, and we're not happy with our

Pahute Mesa results in comparison with the experimental data.
We've been able to model certain aspects of them; we're able to see
the same kind of rarefactions, in the model, coming back from the
hard to soft transitions that we see in the measurements. But they
are only qualitatively similar. Quantitatively, no. I said something
about uniqueness earlier. When you have a layered situation, it is
extremely difficult. From the modelling standpoint what we'd really
like to be able to find is a Pahute Mesa site that doesn't have any soft
layers, but then we'd be afraid to conduct the event, from a
containment standpoint, because the site would be different from
any we've used before.
Carothers: When we talk about differences in the materials,
over what physical dimension do things have to be different to
produce changes in the response?
A p p : The size of the feature compared to the wavelength is
probably the most relevant thing. If a feature that is different is
quite small compared to the wavelength, it may not be very
important. This is not always true, however. It would not take a
very large open fracture to seriously attenuate the signal. The
wavelength is going to increase with increasing distance, so by the
time you get out to where the wave becomes elastic, it's going to
take a fairly large feature to cause a serious perturbation.
Carothers: Let's consider closer to the device. There is the
thought that it doesn't matter much what's close to the device,
because the energy release is so large that it just overwhelms any
minor geologic features. Some folks think that's not a very good
argument.
App: I'm not one of those people. Close in, in the true shock
regime where the wave is supersonic, I don't think response
properties of the solid rock much matter. For rock that is vaporized,
it does make a difference. Now, again, these opinions are based on
modeling. I think properties do matter beyond where the eventual
edge of the cavity will be, at the few kilobar level and below. The
exact range would be somewhat material dependent.
Two and three dimensional effects are important, but our
serious difficulties lie with material response.
Carothers: But that's something you cannot find out in the

laboratory with the tests that you can make today.
A p p : You're right. Not to the degree that we need to. I think
we need more measurements in the field, and from that data,
backing out the response models would be the way we would go.
These would be inferred properties, and once again, there is a
uniqueness problem. But, if you get enough data, using reasonable
assumptions about how a material behaves, augmented by mechani-
cal tests in the laboratory, you might be able to back out how
particular classes of materials behave.
That takes an experimental program, and in fact that is part of
the emphasis right now in verification, to do more well controlled
in-situ experiments. Modeling plays an important role in the
experimental setup. In order to maximize our ability to infer bulk
response properties of the rock, instruments must be located well
into the inelastic zone, and at numerous locations.
To characterize various classes of rock in this way will be an
expensive process, but once having developed a library of proper-
ties, we should have more confidence in modeling, and understand-
ing the more important effects of layering, such as exists at Pahute
Mesa. Currently it is very difficult to sort out the effects of layering.
The Pahute Mesa event named Houston was a rare example of
a site where there's considerable thickness of hard rock without
softer interlayered rock. The soft layers are halfway up the hole. If
we can have another shot in that area, where we can get instrumen-
tation strings deep, and study the propagation of the initial outgoing
wave, then we can learn something about the properties of a
heretofore difficult material to characterize.
Carothers: Carl, when you make the measurements you're
making, I'm sure you must need to know properties of the materials.
Where do you get that information?
Smith: DNA sends cores to Terra Tek principally, where they
are squeezed. The data from that goes principally to Pac Tech,
where Dan Patch does most of the stemming calculations for DNA.
The other big source of information is Maggie Baldwin and the
people at DNA, because they're the ones who have done the
exploratory geophysics work in those holes.
Carothers: Carl you have said, when talking about the equation
of state work, that measurements in the field are not necessarily at
all like those made in the laboratory on samples. Couldn't the same
criticism be made of the data from the cores?
Smith: It's a question of economics. With a fixed pot of dollars
you could spend it all on investigating one little area, and know more
and more about less and less until you know everything about
nothing. Or you could take that fixed pot of dollars and explore a
larger area with selected measurements. This question has always
been a bugaboo for DNA; you've got all these variations on the core
measurements, but everyone wants to treat the material as uniform,
because you do all your calculations with one material.
Actually, for years DNA has been very successful in treating all
this shot area, this material they excite, as roughly uniform material
with some faults and fractures through it. But now, as you go to
smaller and smaller shots, and maybe go into a new tunnel, and
maybe get into places that are not zeolitized, now maybe these
variable things come back to haunt you, and you can't treat them
as a single element. The scale is no longer the high yields where you
overwhelm the geology. If the scale is that for only half a kiloton,
maybe that fault is going to eat you alive.
Carothers: Instead of taking all these cores, which means you
have to drill a hole, why don't you run logging tools? That's
cheaper.
Smith: Logs give you one type of information, the cores give
you different types of information. Cores give you information up
to four kilobars, and the calculators like very much to have that.
Calculations of many kinds are done. One of the important
questions for containment is how the gases in the cavity, originally
at very high temperatures and pressures, flow out into the surround-
ing medium. Central to that is the permeability of the materials in
the earth itself, and in the column of stemming materials. One of the
first efforts to measure, and to calculate that was made by Carl
Keller, then at Los Alamos, in the early seventies.
Keller: The flow paths of concern were the stemming column,
the chimney, the hypothetical hydrofracture, and that was about it.
The characterization of the medium required for hydrofrac calcula-
tions was never done. The permeabilities were not measured. The
in-situ stresses were not measured. There were no serious measure-

ments even of stresses near the events. There were serious efforts,
but the data certainly weren't of the quality that there is now.
Cavity pressures were not measured. They were inferred from LOS
pipe measurements of pressure, and those weren't too bad. Now
they seem to be what they were thought to be then; a lower bound
on the cavity pressure.
Carothers: How could you run a gas flow, or hydrofracture
code? You just listed a number of the important parameters and said
you didn't know them.
Keller: Cowles and Yerba were the first two Iine-of-sight pipe
events after Baneberry. Yerba was in a shaft, and so we had access.
So, one of the things we did, having that state of ignorance, was that
I designed a permeability measurement scheme for the Yerba shaft,
and the J-6 folks built the hardware, installed it, and made the
measurements. Every hundred feet in the Yerba shaft we made
permeability measurements, and those are still the only permeabil-
ity measurements with that kind of resolution in existence.
Those were done with two drill holes. One was the air injection
hole, and you measured the flow rate and the pressure history at the
bottom of the hole. They were essentially packed off so you only
had a small volume at the bottom, which was the gas source, that
was free to leak into the medium. And given the pressure history
and the flow rate, you can determine a permeability. The second
hole measured the pressure of the flow field. That's a check, a
redundant check, and from that you can also deduce a permeability.
And so with that over-constrained system we could tell whether or
not it was really spherical flow, and we could tell whether it had
come to equilibrium, and some of those kind of things.
The Yerba measurements have been invoked countless times as
characteristic of alluvium. Well, alluvium is a highly variable
material. One of the most glaring examples of the differences in
alluvium are the Agrini crater, which was 200 feet deep and bigger
at the bottom than at the top, versus Pike, where the alluvium just
fell in like a big sand pile. Some of the alluviums crater very
gracefully; they just fall in and there's a big flow, a big slump down
to the bottom.
There have been other permeability measurements made by

other people. Frank Morrison and the Livermore folks tried to
deduce permeabilities from pressure histories measured during the
stemming process, which is kind of a clever way of doing it. It's
pretty complicated, but in principle you can do it with enough math,
and get a measure of the permeability.
Another way was to measure pressure histories in drill-back
holes, and from that try to measure overall permeabilities. I think
those are fine for a real gross measurement, but there are serious
problems with them. For one, the volume of the hole can be a real
problem because you have to fill the hole. It's not like you have this
ideal pressure probe which does not influence the flow. You have
to fill the hole, and these flows are very small with that kind of
driver, so it takes time to fill the hole. And then the hole can
actually leak off, because they're not all cased, and most of them are
not grouted even if they do have a casing in them. And so you never
know, because you can get strange flows. You can come up in this
hole, and run down to the bottom of that one, and shortcut the
medium. There are a lot of problems with those measurements. So,
it gives you a very gross measure. There are better ways of making
measurements.
You can even infer permeabilities. If you presume that you
know the noncondensable gas source, then you can, from the arrival
times at the surfaces for those that have leaked, infer chimney
permeability.
Carothers: Well, along these same lines, in the CEP you often
hear somebody say something like, "Well, you may get a fracture to
here, or there may be gas transport to there, but this layer has a lot
of permeability and porosity, and so it will just soak everything up.
Keller: Yes, you do hear that a lot. The people making those
statements are not very quantitative in those areas, but they could
be. Those kinds of statements could be supported completely with
simple noncondensable gas flow calculations. Or you can even do
hydrofrac calculations. Generally people infer that if you have a
high porosity, high air void content, then you have a high perme-
ability. That's sometimes true, but not necessarily so.
And the permeability is never measured; it's always inferred
from other characteristics. That's bothered me forever. There have
been some pretty strong statements about pore space available, but
it is the permeability that determines whether it's really available.

Some air voids are not available; they're in pumice shards, for
instance, and they're sealed off.
Near the detonation point the shock pressures, the stresses and
the strains the material undergoes, and the time scales on which they
occur are beyond those that can be created in the laboratory. Data
from instruments located in the material near the shot point can give
some information, but the environment is severe, and such experi-
ments are extremely difficult to do. Carl Smith has done extensive
work on developing ways to make such measurements in the field,
on both nuclear events and high explosive experiments.
Smith: 1 have principally done gauging work, working on gauge
development techniques, trying to make in-situ equation of state
measurements. Equation of state measurements typically are made
in the laboratory on small samples. Of course, if the sample breaks
you discard it, and get an intact sample. But field work invariably
involves fractures, and faults, and things like that, and so the big
push for many years was how to develop techniques, and how to
make measurements for in-situ equation of state type work.
The equation of state measurements principally revolve around
the area from the near elastic into the shock wave regime, so you're
through the yield range of soft rocks, like tuffs. That's from like half
a kilobar up to the ten kilobar regime, where the yield effects take
place, and that's where the unknowns are in the equations of states.
In such work you need measurements of both motion and
stress, because of the three dimensionality of the meaurements in
the field. In gas-gun work you have one dimension, and you can take
stress measurements and get the motion measurements out of them,
through the Hugoniot equations of state. On a gas-gun type of shot
you slice the rock, put in these material gauges, which can be as thin
as mils, and then glue all the layers back together. The shock passes
through the rock from one end to the other, and so it's one
dimensional.
In measurements in the field, because of the spherical diver-
gence, you need the hoop stresses, the radial strains and the radial
stresses, and particle velocity measurements. And so, very quickly,
you become aware that the Achilles heel of all that work is in
developing instruments to make viable measurements.
The seventies were the days when we started developing the so-
called ytterbium gauge. Ytterbium is an odd-ball element that sits
off the periodic chart, and has a very strange electronic structure.
As discovered by Bridgeman and others, it has a very wild stress-
piezoresistive effect. In other words, as you squeeze, it changes it's
resistance.
On a field event you don't have the ability to build an in-
material gauge, as you do on a gas-gun shot. You have to drill holes,
insert the gauges, and put in grouting material. The concern then
is, does the grout material match the host in some way. In
particular, you want a measurement that is representative of the
free-field stress in the rock, in a material that is not the rock itself.
That's the so-called inclusion problem that people have worked on
for numerous years.
Carothers: You say you want the grout to match the rock in
some way; which characteristics are most important?
Smith: Compressibility. In other words, does the grout
deform in the same way as the host rock.
Carothers: When you get into the ten kilobar range, you're in
the region where the tuffs are plastic. That means you're near the
edge of the cavity, where it's still growing. How do you make things
survive?
Smith: They don't. Principally it's the cables and electrical
leads that are destroyed. Sometimes we can go in on a mine-back
and find these gauges. When we find them, the first thing we do is
see if the gauge is still intact. Almost invariably it is, but the leads
that have been severed, or torn off the package, or somewhere
something like a fault has moved differentially and sheared the
cables.
What we're getting out of the gauges now is the arrival time,
a rise to peak, and then a little bit of unloading, enough stress wave
unloading so we can say that we have indeed captured the peak,
rather than having it go up and stop before it reaches the top. One
of the efforts nowadays is to enhance those recordings, and to
incease the recording times by building armored cables, and so on.
To build stonger cables we're now using a technique that uses
wire-rope. The first time we did that we took a wire rope, took off
the outside strands, replaced the center core with the electrical
cable, and then wrapped the outside wires back on the rope. Now
we've gotten sophisticated, and we're going to a wire-rope manu-
facturer to have the cables built that way. At the end of a
production run on something of about the right size, we stick our
spool of cable at the back of the machine, and have the wire-rope
made with our electrical cable as the center.
The shock wave damages the materials through which it passes,

and changes their properties. Those properties are of importance in
what occurs in the later time processes around the cavity. Attempt-
ing to reproduce in the laboratory the damage that occurs due to the
shock loading is extremely difficult to do, and the material proper-
ties measured on such damaged rock samples as can be produced
may be quite different than those of materials near the detonation.
Persons attempting to develop models to predict the ground re-
sponse must often infer the material properties by trying to match
their calculations to data such as arrival times, peak values, and
decay times of the pressure pulse.
Keller: One of the really interesting experiments we did was on

one of Sandia's shots called One Ton, which was done by Carl
Smith. We obtained, from the working point region of One Ton,
big, twelve inch core. We took that to SRI, cut it, machined it, and
put it in our HE charges with the wires, to measure the response of
that tuff from the working point of the One Ton HE shot. We also
took core to Terra Tek, and measured, in the laboratory, the
strength properties of that same material.
Both S-Cubed and Pac Tech did calculations of the SRI test, and
of One Ton. This was before the shot. Then Sandia shot One Ton,
and made good stress measurements all around it. I asked Sandia
not to tell the calculators what the results were.
I had asked the calculators to take the properties of the cores
that Terra Tek had measured, and calculate the SRI test. Then they
could see the SRI test results, and they could take those results and
modify their equation-of-state if they wanted to, and then they were
to predict the One Ton results.
We met at S-Cubed, and they had their viewgraphs of the stress
histories at the various ranges, which had been pre-selected on the
SRI tests and on the One Ton tests. We had pre-selected the scales
to use in the plots of the results, so you could overlay them. Sandia
would put down the measurement from One Ton, and S-Cubed
would put down their stress history, and then Pac Tech would put
down their stress history, right on top. The correlation between the
predictions and the measurements was really quite good. It wasn't
equally good at all ranges. The calculations were better close-in
than they were far-out.
We discovered, out of that series, that the way Terra Tek was
measuring the pressure versus volume curve was not good. They
just put the sample in the holder and squeezed it. From that they
would get a pressure versus volume curve. However, if they put the
sample in the holder, squeezed it up to the overburden stress, where
the samples had been obtained, and let it sit there for a while, it
would creep to a lower volume. Doing that sort of replaced the
sample in the mountain, and now when they ran their pressure
versus volume curve they got much lower compaction. It turned out
that you needed lower compaction in order to match the results.
That was a really instructive series, where we compared our
predictions and our procedures to reality. Sandia was very helpful
on that.
Patch: The most important things that go into the models are
the mechanical test data that are done in the laboratory, on cores.
And those tests have some serious limitations that everybody
understands. The people doing the tests certainly do, and the users
do as well. One of the most serious limitations is that they are
limited in the total amount of strain, because they can only squash
the rock so much. Nuclear bombs, near where the bomb is, have
a way of scrunching the rock a whole lot. That strain path is just not
accessible in the laboratory.
Carothers: My impression is that they can go up to about four
kilobars.
Patch: Yes, they can go to about four kilobars. We have gotten
up to six kilobars at Terra Tek, and I think eight kilobars is doable
in a Terra Tek type test. They can go up to twenty-five kilobars, but
the problem is, you don't get out the data you need. What you're
really looking for is the response of the rock in terms of its deviatoric
response, and so on. Just pushing on a rock and measuring how
much it squeezes gives you some data, but there are many other
things you want to know. So, it doesn't help just to go to some high
stress level.
The other factor is that you can load the core to four kilobars
by loading it axially, but you can only deform it so much before you
reach the limits of the machine. The problem is that in the ground,
rock that's squeezed to four kilobars subsequently moves out a long
ways, and undergoes a lot of strain. It laterally stretches and it
compresses axially, and that occurs at much less than four kilobars.
A great deal of that motion might be at only a quarter or half, or
maybe three-quarters of a kilobar. A lot of that deformation goes
on at low levels, and one could track that in the laboratory, except
that there are mechanical limitations on the machinery.
The other problem we have with mechanical test data, and in
some ways it's almost more serious, is that in the ground, when the
material is deformed there is a funny kind of lateral constraint. To
first order the material is forced to move out spherically symmetri-
cally. Maybe block motion happens later on, and other funny
things, but by and large, if you go in and look at any given piece of
material, you can pretty much convince yourself that it's been
homogeneously moved out and stretched. To the zeroth order it's
an isovolumetric strain path. If you try to do that on a sample in
the laboratory, you can do the compression part of it. Once you
try to mimic the part of the strain path that amounts to stretching
it laterally, and taking up that so it is kind of isovolumetric, the rock
wants to fracture along a shear plane. It wants to form these shear
planes, and now suddenly it's not a continuum material anymore.
You're doing a friction test in a way, and you get data out of the test
that looks reasonable. The only problem is, it doesn't have any
relationship to the way the material is behaving either in the field
or in any kind of continuum sense. That's one of the serious
problems, and we have to finesse our way around that.
Rimer: I've been working for a number of years, trying to

understand how the rock gets damaged. I have not been able to get
data in tuff, because its permeability is so low, for effective stress
modeling. So, I assume the laboratory data we have has the pore
pressure built into it, because the strengths are lower because of the
saturation. I am still trying to get measures of how much of the
material is damaged from the shot.
We tried to do a laboratory material properties test at Terra

Tek that would go along the strain paths. Unfortunately, you
cannot confine the material in the laboratory like it is underground.
Underground it's confined by adjacent material doing the same
thing. You have membranes around it in the laboratory, with
pressures on them, but you can only measure the strains in a couple
of locations around the circumference. And, you don't even know
what path you're on. As you start to unload the material, you get
a through-going fracture, so those samples are worthless for mate-
rial tests after that. So, that work was unsuccessful.
There is another set of data on reentries and core samples taken
at the time of Hybla Gold, which was near Dining Car. These show
that the samples that were near Dining Car were damaged greatly.
Their strengths were extremely low, much lower than we can
reproduce in the laboratory by damaging the material to the same
peak stress levels. So, my hypothesis was that the total shear-strain
the material has seen is greatly different, based on calculations, than
with any model. And that's the difference; we should make the
damage that we see a function of shear-strain.
In late 1 990 I and Bill Proffer, who did the calculations for me,
used that Terra Tek data to do some residual stress calculations.
Those calculations give grossly different residual stresses. The peak
in the residual stress is further out, but it's still considerably higher
than the cavity pressure. Even though the material is now much
weaker, peak stresses are the same as with the other model. So are
peak velocities, so are cavity pressures, and cavity size. The material
goes out more, comes back more, and ends up at about the same
place. But, it undergoes a lot more plastic work. It gives low peak
residual stresses further out, but gives almost no residual stresses
out to, let's say, the range of the FAC, the Fast Acting Closure. The
other model would say a third of the way from the cavity to FAC
you've got strong residual stresses, much higher than cavity pres-
sure.
1 think that's why we see radiation as far as the FAC on many
of the DNA events. There's a nice closure, but it's permeable, and
the residual stresses aren't there to keep it closed. And so, you get
a little seep of material through that grout to the FAC. It doesn't
influence containment because there's a gas-tight closure further
down, but there's a little seep. Operationally it means we can't

examine and take out the FAC anymore. But I think that's in line
with the new calculations I've been doing with this new model.
We know that post-shot we have much lower strength in the
material. When this strength reduction occurs is anyone's guess.
My guess is that it doesn't occur when the peak stress is reached.
The material continues to strain all the while it's moving out, and
the strains it gets to may be a factor of three higher than the strain
it sees at the peak stress of the shock wave.
1 recently saw some interesting data. Terra Tek had taken
preshot samples from Disko Elm, and they did the normal tests on
them. Then they did SEM tests, the scanning electron microscope
tests. Then they used what they call a Wood's Metal approach,
where they use melted metal, which gets into the open pores and
fractures of the sample. They shine a laser on the sample, and they
get marvelous color pictures of the microstructure at different
scales, even better than they get from the SEM pictures.
They did the same thing to materials they took post-shot, at the
same stress levels. The pictures are totally different. At two
kilobars, from samples that were damaged in the laboratory by
squeezing, you see some signs of pore crush-up, but just a little bit.
Once in a while you see a little fracture. At two kilobars, in the in-
situ, shot damaged material, there are fractures throughout it. It
looks like a totally different process has occurred.
Carothers: Well, sure. The material near the shot doesn't get
just compressed. It also gets stretched tangentially, because it's
moving out.
Rimer: That's right. Exactly. And that's true even at two
kilobars. That's what I mean by the strain test. I'm using shear-
strain, because mathematically it's a principal invariant. The lateral
strain is tensile, the radial strain is compressive. They add together,
and you get four percent, roughly, at four kilobars peak stress.
That's almost all radial strain, but then it keeps stretching as it
moves out almost incompressibly. The strain is enormous; you can
get twelve percent strain, and that's what I'm trying to model. I
don't know the numbers, the parameters, but when it reaches ten
percent strain I think it's mush. And we've seen plenty of mush near
the cavity. These results that Terra Tek showed are another
confirmation of that.
Ristvet: You get into totally microfailed material as you get

about a quarter of a cavity radius away from the cavity boundary.
You start seeing isolated pockets of this material from about two
cavity radii in, and it is basically like cohesive silt. I would say its
unconfined strength is only a few hundred psi, as a result of the
microfracturing. We've documented that at Terra Tek and USGS,
and we see it in the shear wave drop, and so forth. It's for real.
Rimer: Terra Tek also did uniaxial strain, and triaxials on those
damaged samples from Disko Elm. They have much lower strength,
and the strengths get lower and lower, within the scatter of the tuff,
as it's been hit harder. I don't know if strain is the right thing to use,
but it's much better than stress.
App: In the effective stress there are theories that the pressure
of the water, after it has been shocked and some unloading has
occurred, exceeds the stress in the matrix. Then, essentially the
response of the whole aggregate is determined by the response
properties of the water. And the more water you have, the more
that's going to occur. In an effective stress model, the strength,
after the material has been loaded up to a certain point, comes back
to zero. There's no strength left, and it is the water in the pores that
determines the response of the material.
One reason the effective stress models have not been adopted
universally is their extreme sensitivity to small changes in mechani-
cal behavior such as dilation, porosity increase due to shear induced
microfractures. Pore pressure, and therefore shear strength, is very
sensitive to such increases in porosity. Yet, in the field, we do not
observe huge variations in observed phenomena from site to site, at
least not at the scale that is suggestd could occur due to dilation.
Carothers: In P tunnel there was a small change in something
that made a big change in the response of the ground.
App: Well, yes. DNA does have a prime example that is
contrary to what I was just saying. Why was Mission Cyber so
different from Disko Elm? Those were two shots that were very
similar. If I'd thought of that a minute ago when I started on that
little spiel about not seeing much difference, I might not have said
it. There is apparently some change so hidden that nobody's been
able to identify it. Thus far, the only difference that has been
identified is the minerology, and we cannot determine how that
would alter the phenomenology. One site has been altered to

zeolite, and the other hasn't. The mechanical properties from both
sites are about the same. There is no known answer at this time.
Rimer: With the things we usually successfully measure, the
free-field ground motion, the calculational results do not tell you
which model is better. Residual stresses would, and we're still trying
to measure them; real hard we're trying to measure them. The
problem has been gauge breakage, and cable breakage.
Carothers: How about a self-contained, hardened instrument
that you recover after the shot?
Rimer: Great idea ! We tried that with the SCEMS, the Self
Contained Environment Measurement System, a big heavy piece of
equipment that does that. And the batteries went dead on it.
There's a paper by a guy named Starfield, in which he talks
about the limits of our ability to understand rocks, and classifies
calculations by how much data is available on the material; how
much data is available to isolate the physical models that are
important. It's a very interesting paper. It really tells you how
limited you are in rock mechanics, in your understanding. That's
not to say you don't learn anything about how materials behave by
looking at measurements, and trying to match measurements. You
need to know as much as you can about the properties of the rock,
and I get very exercised every time I'm at a CEP, because they go
into enormous detail about sonic velocities, and physical properties,
but they don't talk about strength. And containment is, to zeroth
order, a strength phenomenon. Water matters, for cavity pressure,
and it has an effect on strength. Gas porosity matters in attenuating
peak motions, and surface velocities. Why anyone cares about
surface velocities for these deeply buried shots I don't know. I guess
it's easy to measure.
Carothers: I don't think anybody knows how to measure the
in-situ strength, unfortunately.
Rimer: That's true. Now, Bob Schock looked at how you could
determine strength from the measurements we have. He found a
strong correlation with the shear modulus, the modulus of rigidity,
the shear wave velocity. Any one of those, because they all use the
same quantity, really. 1 always thought an improvement would be
to measure the in-situ shear wave velocity, because you can get a
shear modulus, and from that maybe get an idea of the strength.
Not the full story, but a feeling. Now, John Rambo, at Livermore,
looks at drilling rates as a measure of strength. He's come up with
some interesting correlations.
Carothers: But the drilling rate depends on a lot of things you
don't know. How sharp is the bit, how much weight is on it, are the
drillers pushing today, or taking it easy.
Rimer: I understand. But it's something that's worth looking
at.
Another thing we spent a great deal of time on was Pile Driver.
I must have done thirty or more one-dimensional calculations, and
a number of 2-D calculations, to develop a model for the in-situ
strength of the Pile Driver granite. The intact rock was very strong,
but the pulse width measurements that Perret and Bass, at Sandia,
did, and SRI did showed wider pulse widths, which shows weaker
material. By pulse width I mean velocity versus time.
Carothers: There are folks who might say, "The rock is very
strong. We've taken good, intact cores to the lab, checked them
out, and it's strong rock all right. No doubt about i t . " And there
are other folks who might say, "That's all very well, but that's a
mountain there, which is not intact. It's full of cracks and fractures
which weakens the rock."
Rimer: A one-foot joint spacing.
Carothers: For example. And so, you have all these numbers
from these unfractured cores, but you've got deal with all this
fractured rubble, to exaggerate a little.
Rimer: I spent a considerable period of my life dealing with
that. Ted Cherry's idea, and he first thought of it back at Livermore,
was that there was water in the fractures. At this point I think it's
more likely there's clay there. Either way it results in a weaker,
lubricated joint system. Ted modeled that with an effective stress
model. We tried a number of things, and that's what I spent a lot
of time on. What could we do that was reasonable, where we used
the laboratory strength of the granite, which was superstrong, and
then brought in some physical process to reduce the strength? We
used the effective stress model, and ran 2-D calculations which we
calibrated to pieces of data; Perret's underground particle velocity
measurements, the geologic structure, which was a weak weathered

layer, then a layer where Perret measured the wave speeds to be
slightly less, and then the working point material.
We were able to match all the ground motion measurements,
both underground and free surface, with that model. The peaks
were a little different, but the SRI data is from a different azimuth
than the Perret data, and that may explain it. We were able to
match, with a 2-D calculation, that data, but I don't believe it. 1
don't believe that effective stress is the true model. 1 think it's more
something that happens in the joints, and that could be tied in with
the pore pressure in the joints. We had a program, which DARPA
funded, thats consisted of small-scale explosive tests at SRI, using 3/
8 of a gram of HE, to look at this.
These were in granite cylinders. I was doing calculations,
supervising the experiments that Alex Florence was doing up at SRI,
and having special laboratory material properties tests done by
Chris Schultz, at LaMont Dougherty Geologic Observatory at
Columbia University. In these experiments SRI was measuring
particle velocities, looking at wet versus dry, where they measured
the pore fluid pressures preshot.
We had overburden pressures on those cylinders. We put
everything in a balloon, pumped up the gas pressure, and then blew
the balloon. The granite just splintered into pieces. Then we put
lead shot around the cylinder to let it go out slowly, and the granite
microfractured. That fracture spacing, when the cube root of the
yield was scaled up to Pile Driver, gave us, within a factor of two,
that one-foot joint spacing. We were trying to get to the bottom of
this question, and we spent three or four years on it.
I finally concluded that the strain rate effects in the small scale
experiments were too great. They decreased the strength so much
that they were not relevant to Pile Driver. However, they still
showed an effect of water, but not as strong an effect as I believed
to be in-situ.
As the number of events increased more and more information
accumulated about the events that were taking place. New people
joined the program, perhaps an old-timer ot two left, and there was
increasing difficulty in relating a current shot to the experience on
an earlier one. What previous experience had there been? Had there
been a similar geologic setting for a shot, similar material proper-
ties, a similar yield at a similar depth? Eventually there was

recognition of the need to bring together in some accessable fashion
what was beginning to be a large amount of data.
Rambo: In the late sixties, while I was still involved with slifer
measurements, I and a lady by the name of Mary Lou Higuera were
set together in a nice large room in Building 111, and told to start
collecting all the data on our shots. So we started collecting data,
and I wrote a simple version of a data base that would work. 1
decided what the logic should be, and interestingly over the years
that piece of logic has still remained as one of the ways of getting
the data out.
Carothers: What sort of things did you have in your data bank?
Rambo: Yield mostly, at first. The groups that I was working
with were very interested in yield, because seismic happened to be
a big thing at that time. So we had different kinds of seismic yields
in there. The old slifer yields were put in there as sort of a
comparison, and there was some thought of going back and rework-
ing all of the old seismic data. And, it went further than that. We
tried to put a little bit of geology in also.
Then, after Baneberry, the tone of it changed dramatically.
Then it became very interesting as to what caused things to leak, and
were there any clues that could be put together to extrapolate to
serious problems of that sort. I recall the day after Baneberry
happened, of looking in the database, and gee, there seemed to be
a definite correlation of shooting shots shallower than six hundred
feet and leakages showing up. So I wrote a very limited memo to
about four or five people. Billy Hudson then took some of that data
and extrapolated it in a more formal sense, and that became policy.
Some of those data bank runs that we did in those early days really
did cause the development of some of the procedures that we use
nowadays.
That data collection is still being carried on. Now Los Alamos
information is included as well. The two Laboratories do trade this
information to update both of their data banks. Los Alamos
independently started a data bank about the time of Baneberry, and
did find some similar correlations to what we found.
Keller: One of the things I did before Baneberry was to develop

a library of shot data. So, 1 evolved the first data bank at Los
Alamos, and I got it to print out in regular book format so I could
trim the printouts and bind them. Then I had a data book in which
I had all the shot names, and the dates, and the depths of burial, the
yields, and everything else that was known about them. That was
one of the things that was picked up very quickly, and they decided
to expand that data book to include all the Lab data on the shots.
The device designers also had their own shot data book, but it was
more crude; it had been developed much earlier.
At that time, as I remember, there were like 72 underground
events, total. And there were only Los Alamos events included in
the data. We didn't even think about Livermore; somehow that was
irrelevant experience. We were really pretty parochial. And the
Livermore data wasn't readily available either. So, I only put
together those Los Alamos events, and I remember the highest yield
event I had was Halfbeak, and the lowest yield was Solendon.
179
7
Logging and Logging Tools
Paul Fenske, before he turned to hydrology, spent several years

working for oil companies, doing logging on holes thought to have
penetrated an oil bearing formation. These were small diameter,
cased, fluid-filled holes often drilled to depths of many thousands
of feet. Here the problem was not to obtain the kinds of data about
rock properties needed for code calculations, but to determine
where, if at all, the oil bearing regions were so the casing could be
perforated there, and the oil pumped out.
Fenske: There was a standard set of geophysical logs; there was
a resistivity log, a neutron log, and what was basically a conductivity
log. It was one of those logs where you had two coils, and we
transmitted from one coil to the other. The ability to transmit from
one coil to the other was given by the conductivity of the formation.
We would run those induction logs, I guess they would call them
today.
The neutron log was a porosity log, essentially. We looked for
the hydrogen content of the rocks. If you have a real clean
formation you would find a difference between the gas in the well,
and the hydrogen content, but most of the time you couldn't
depend on that, because most of the time the formation wasn't that
uniform. It wasn't isotropic or homogeneous, and so you couldn't
depend on that. There have been a lot of advances made in the logs,
how you interpret the data, and what kind of logs you use since that
time. This was in 1952, and we had, by today's technology, some
rather simple logs; induction logs, neutron logs, resistivity logs.
We used those for the purpose of defining what the structure
was in the area, and also interpreted them in terms of where the pay
zones, the high porosity zones, were. Basically, we were trying to
determine if there was porosity there or not. At that time the logs
were not good enough to determine if there was really oil there or
not. You could tell if there was porosity, and you could tell if you
were dealing with a shale, or dealing with limestone, or sandstone.
You could tell where the formation tops were, and the formation
bottoms, and things like that. But you could not really tell, from the
logs, where you had oil. What you can do, because you also run the
resistivity log, and oil is essentially a nonconductor compared to
water, you can by a combination of those logs make a pretty good
guess as to whether you have oil, if you have a combination of high
porosity and high resistivity.
The gamma ray log, which we also used, will show you that you
are not in a shale, because shale has higher radioactivity than a
limestone, for example. And, the neutron log will show you that
you have a rock that has a lot of holes in it — high porosity. The
resistivity log will show that there is something in those holes other
than just water. Basically, the induction log was better for that than
a resistivity log. When you had the induction log you could do
pretty well in wells that you knew something about. If you were in
an area, and you knew something about the area because you had
taken cores, and had measured the porosity, you could do pretty
well.
Joe Hearst has been a central figure in the development of
logging tools and methods at the Livermore Laboratory. The initial
impetus, at the Test Site, for ways of determining the various in-situ
properties of different materials encountered in drill holes came
from the Plowshare program. In particular, the use of nuclear
explosives to form craters of different sizes was envisaged as a
means for creating harbors and canals. To predict the yield of the
explosive required at what depth in a particular formation to pro-
duce the desired result required both the development of computer
codes, and a means of obtaining the the properties of the rocks
involved as input data for those codes. The oil companies had
developed various tools to measure properties associated with the
presence of oil when an exploratory hole seeking an oil-bearing
formation was drilled, and it was from this base of experience that
the development of instruments that could be used in the nuclear
programs came.
Hearst: When I was working on the Plowshare program I had
to calculate an event; 1 think it was Danny Boy, a cratering shot.
One of the things you had to put in the code as one of the rock
properties was the sound speed. Well, I discovered when I was given
the sound speed from laboratory measurements, the calculated
signal arrived at the surface in about half the time it did in real life.
Logging and Logging Tools 181
I thought perhaps something was wrong with the numbers I'd

been given. So, I decided I should go to the field and measure the
sound speed. I went to the field, and I reinvented what is known as
the uphole survey. What you do is you make a noise like an
explosion, underground, and you time the signal coming to the
surface. I also reinvented the refraction survey. There you hit a
hammer on the ground and listen to the signal coming back.
Of course, refraction surveys had been standard for years, but
I didn't know that. I invented it again out of ignorance. Then I
decided maybe I didn't believe the density numbers either, and I
believe that I reinvented the density logging tool, or re-conceived
it, using gamma ray reflection, or gamma ray back-scattering.
That's how I got into the logging business. 1 had all these numbers
that I didn't believe, that didn't work, and so I started reinventing
some of these things. And then I discovered, first of all, that there
was a logging group at the Test Site, which 1 hadn't known about.
And, secondly, that there was a logging industry, but I didn't know
that either, at the time.
Then, one day - - I was in a ride pool with Don Rawson, who
was at the time the head of geology in K Division - - Don said, "Joe,
how would you like to take charge of logging for K Division, and be
in charge of the logging effort in Nevada?" I almost said, "What's
logging?"
But that's how I got into it. I needed the data. I don't
remember when I found out about the logging group in Nevada, but
at first I didn't even know about them. They were developing
seismic measurements, and improving on them, and they were using
commercial logging companies, which I had never heard of, like
Birdwell, and Wellex. I was reinventing all this stuff in a vacuum.
Carothers: One of the things researchers are supposed to do
is look at the literature, Joe.
Hearst: I didn't even know there was a literature.
The logging people that I knew in Nevada were in support of
Plowshare, because the Plowshare people were interested in break-
ing up the rocks, and when or where the signal came to the surface.
They were doing cratering shots, and they were worried about
damage, and earthquakes. The Panama Canal effort was what was
funding all this, so that was what the Nevada group was working on.
Rambo: In the Nevada group we were trying to develop new

logging tools. And, we were evaluating the commercially available
tools from Birdwell, and I think Wellex. We weren't very happy with
what we were seeing, because those tools were all borrowed from
the oil patch, and those people were not interested in the same
things we were, at the time. We were interested more in physical
properties than in blips on an electric log. On the cratering events
we were able to drill a lot of holes and pull out samples, and make
measurements on those, and get material properties in that way.
So, during this time we were developing logging tools to
measure these unknowns, and density was one of the big items we
were looking at. We had just gotten one of the old 1620 IBM
computers, and that was a miracle machine at that time. I learned
all about programming that. We bought the second version of the
Rand Tablet, which was a digitizing device, which had etched lines
on it. I had a stylus, and you could digitize logs with this electronic
pencil. For every point you got, it would punch a number in a piece
of paper tape. So, I wrote programs to do this translation, and i
wrote the programs for the IBM 1620. We would put on a reel of
paper tape that was maybe about eight to ten inches in diameter,
turn it on just before we went home, and this thing would run all
night long digitizing a density log. Then we'd process it in a Cal
Comp plotter, which was an old version of a plotter, and convert
what was kilocounts at one time to density, which was the real thing.
Carothers: What was the source of the input data? What kind
of an instrument were you using?
Rambo: What it was for the density log was a cobalt 60 source.
The gammas would backscatter from the formation after the source
was held up against the wall of a hole at various locations. It was a
gamma-gamma density; the backscatter was the indication of the
density. I forget whether there was two or three feet of separation
between the sensor and receiver. You couldn't get the receiver too
far away, or you wouldn't sense anything; if it was too close you'd
only sense the source. You then had to go through various
calibrations to get the density.
We were also dealing at that time with a firm called Birdwell,
which was big in the logging field, and which did the Test Site
logging. We were trying to do our processing in-house, and to
develop a whole logging program. That eventually became the

modern logging programming we now have. Those were the early
days of developing those sort of things.
Carothers: Why didn't the Lab use the commercial tools? Why
build up an in-house logging capability? There were companies that
had logged hundreds of miles of holes.
Hearst: Because the conditions were different. The commer-
cial tools were developed for deep, small holes that would be fluid-
filled because they were below the water table. We were logging in
emplacement holes, so first of all, we were logging above the water
table, and almost all commercial tools were, and are, designed to
work in water-filled holes, or liquid-filled holes.
When we were trying to do seismic surveys, at first we tried to
couple them with water. We'd drill an eight-inch hole, dump a
truckloadofwaterintoit, and it would flush like a toilet. We learned
you can't do that. Even for seismic surveys we had to develop a new
method of stemming with sand and things like that, because the
commercial methods wouldn't work in the holes we had.
So, we needed methods for a dry hole, and a big hole. First a
dry hole. For Plowshare we didn't need big hole tools, we needed
dry hole tools. And so we developed dry hole methods. We also
needed higher accuracy for many of these things than was available
from the commercial tools at the time. First of all, velocity; our first
paper was on an uphole survey, which was a standard procedure,
which was an order of magnitude higher accuracy than industry
used. For the short distances which were used on the cratering
shots, we needed the higher accuracy. Or, at least we thought we
did. For density, we had rough, dry holes, and we had to develop
tools that would work in them.
The first thing we worked on was a lock-in geophone, to get
better accuracy in measuring velocities. I didn't work on that much;
that was done by Dick Carlson and the people in Nevada. We used
that for downhole surveys rather than uphole. The geophones
would lock into the borehole, and measure the travel time from an
HE shot on the surface. We were measuring the sound speed for the
code calculations. One of the reasons for that is that laboratory
measurements on samples, especially for sound speed, have nothing
to do with field measurements.
For laboratory measurements you take a core sample, a nice

solid core which doesn't have any cracks in it, and which doesn't fall
apart. In the field things aren't like that. I remember the Sulky
event, where you could look down the hole and see cracks you could
put your arm into. And of course, the acoustic signal has to come
through that broken up, fractured material. The Test Site is very
nasty that way. And, the fractures at the Test Site are not filled with
water — they're filled with air, which gives a tremendous attenua-
tion for acoustic signals. That's why we had to make those
measurements with the geophones. There is that factor of two that
I mentioned, between the laboratory and field measurements.
People still fall into that trap sometimes.
Don Larsen developed some very thin velocity gauges, and we
then could look at the velocity history of rock samples in the lab,
using very small HE charges. We also worked a lot on stress gauges,
and we're still working on them. Checking calculations with actual
measurements is a lifetime program.
Carothers: The Buggy event, which used five simultaneous
detonations, was a great success, in that it made a real ditch. It
demonstrated that you could actually calculate these row charge
effects.
Hearst: Before Buggy was Palanquin, which demonstrated you
couldn't calculate everything.
Carothers: The only real work that was being done was being
done for Plowshare, and basically being done for the cratering shots.
Now, the Plowshare people had various other ideas, such gas
stimulation. Did you do any work on those kind of things?
Hearst: Logging was logging, but for most of the other things
commercial logs could be used. Another thing was verification.
There was Salmon, in Mississippi, and Dick Carlson especially did a
lot of logging work on Salmon. In the second place, on Salmon, if
you recall, the ground shock caused much more damage to buildings
than people had anticipated. It was a real surprise. We then started
bringing seismic people into our group, and we started getting
involved in what we would now call verification work. We then did
logging for that, as well as calculations and lab experiments.
Carothers: On device development shots, as differentiated
from Plowshare events, were there samples or logs taken?
Hearst: I don't think the test program people did much of that.
We didn't get involved with the test program until Baneberry.
Plowshare was vanishing, and the Lab also had the first big reduc-
tion-in-force. Just about that time, very providentially, along came
Baneberry, and that put us back in business, logging for the test
program. I was still doing calculations at that time.
Carothers: What logs could you do at that time?
Hearst: We could do almost anything that we can do now.
There were very sophisticated acoustic things, which weren't useful
at the Test Site, but as soon as we started working on verification,
then we could use the conventional stuff for things like Salmon and
Sterling, and so on. I recall doing lots of seismic surveys on Pahute
Mesa events, and I think it was pre-Baneberry.
Now, the quality wasn't as good. The measurements weren't
as sophisticated as they are today, but the techniques were available
in the sixties. There's very little new that has come alongsince then.
The only thing, really, is borehole gravity, which was conceived in
the fifties, but not used in the field until later. And it's still not very
commercial. You could, in the sixties, do acoustic, density,
electrical logs.
The epithermal neutron log was a commercial tool; we just
used it. We did invent one density logging tool, which was for
Plowshare, and we subsequently stopped using it. It was a rugosity
insensitive density logging tool. When we got into bigger holes we
stopped using it, and started using commercial tools, and calibrating
them, and living with the rugosity effects.
So, it was all commercial tools, and we had to make them work.
That was the switch from Plowshare to verification and test. We
started making commercial tools work. The only tool we developed
that is still in use is the dry-hole acoustic log. The other tools could
be made to work; basically, they had to be calibrated for dry holes.
The thing that I did with the epithermal neutron tool was, after
many years of effort, and learning to run Monte Carlo codes, and
things like that, was to convince management to build me a
calibrator for dry holes. It was boxes of carefully mixed materials,
and those boxes are expensive.
Carothers: Boxes with dirt in them?
Hearst: They had to be big boxes, because the neutrons go long

distances. And the dirt had to be carefully designed to give you
what you wanted, and to give it uniformly and accurately. Actually,
that calibrator didn't work very well.
What we ended up doing, because of engineering and money
constraints, was, we made cells a foot square and six feet high so we
could put them together to make a rectangular parallelepiped, to be
technical, which was six feet high, by three feet by five feet.
Basically it was a slab.
We put carefully measured amounts of material in each one of
the boxes, and shook them to get it uniform. We calculated what
materials we needed, and mixed them. We used sand, and marbles
- - we actually had a million marbles, a whole truck load of marbles
- - and aluminum oxide. Among other things we had to control the
density, and so we had to make mixes of materials of different sizes
to get it dense enough to do what we wanted. We used marbles, and
sand to get higher densities. And aluminum oxide, to get even
higher densities. To a neutron, aluminum looks very much like
silicon. Then we poured in water, and we also had some activated
alumina, which could soak up some water.
We did all that, and it was still not well done. Part of the
problem was that the mixes were made here, and they were sealed
in these aluminum cans, and then they were trucked over the Sierra.
That made the cans expand, because of the low pressure as they
went over the mountains. And so, when the cans got to Nevada they
were bulging. Consequently, they never fit well together.
Carothers: All you had to do was to put a little pinhole in them.
Hearst: They didn't think of it. Remember, they were sealed
to keep the water in there. There were actually reinforcing rods in
them, but that didn't work well enough, and so they bulged. When
you put them together and squeezed as hard as you could, they still
weren't flat; they had gaps, and bumps, and wiggles. And so, they
were never satisfactory. But it took a lot of persuasion to get
management to let me build that facility, and that was what I
contributed — the calibration facility.
There were problems with our first calibrations. We did two

procedures. Our main effort, which was to simulate a big hole, was
this three by five foot wall. And, we took one box out of the middle
of the fifteen boxes to mock up a small hole; that hole, of course,
was square.
Those results are quite different from those in the small
cylindrical hole we now have in our in our new calibrator. A logging
tool is cylindrical, and is up against a wall that is either cylindrical
or flat, and the major effect is right in the front of the tool. One
of the things we discovered was that even in a 72-inch hole there
is a hole-size effect on a neutron log. That's why we had to build
this ENS — the Epithermal Neutron Special, instead of the ENP —
the Epithermal Neutron Porosity — to take care of the hole-size
effect. The Geologic Survey people are unhappy because we almost
always get higher values with the ENS.
The ENS was special because it had more shielding. We put
that bigger shielding on to compensate because we were up against
thesiab. Thesiab was to simulate the big hole — infinite radius. But
because it wasn't right, wasn't really effectively infinite, we had to
put in this extra shielding. We also pulled out one of the boxes in
the middle to simulate a small hole. Now that we've built our new
system, we've found that neither of those simulations is particularly
good.
Our new calibrator is two cylinders, fifteen feet in diameter,
with a six foot diameter hole in the middle. They are vertical
cylinders, six or eight feet highland somewhere between twelve and
fifteen feet outside diameter, with a six foot diameter hole in the
middle. They are made of pie-shaped wedges; each of the two
cylinders has six cells filled with the material. It cost us like a quarter
of a million dollars to fill them — REECO prices. You have to fill
them very, very carefully, and we did a lot of studying of the mixing
of solids. We even sent our engineer to a meeting on the subject,
in Southern California. We came to the conclusion that we could
not make uniform mixes of the solids we wanted to mix. The
technology does not exist to make good uniform mixes of solids of
different sizes, or even of the same size.
Carothers: My mother can do that when she makes sticky buns
with raisins in them. She gets a pretty uniform mix.
Hearst: Well, probably on that scale you can do it. But we

concluded that we just could not guarantee a uniform mix, with dry
particulates. So what we did was, we made layers. Each cell has
fifteen layers, and we know what's in each layer, so we know that
at least on that scale the mix is uniform. We use fifteen layers of the
same mix. The layers may not each be completely homogeneous,
but the neutrons see more than one layer.
The layers are all the same recipe, mixed in a concrete mixer.
The problem is that the concrete mixer may not necessarily get
things uniform, but it makes it uniform on the scale that the
neutrons see. We put these mixes in place, and then vibrated the
cells to get the right density, because we had to have a known
density as well as a known water content. So, we vibrated these huge
cells each time we put in a layer, to settle it to get the right density.
We did all sorts of experiments on that sort of thing. We did
experiments where we would pour stuff into a container after we
mixed it, then shake it to settle it to get the right density, and it
would separate.
Carothers: Well, sure. The heavy things fall down to the
bottom. It's the shaking that's doing it.
Hearst: Yes, but otherwise you can't get the right density. So,
it's probably still not uniform. Afterwards we made all kinds of
measurements with logging tools, and other things. I've got a book
an inch and a half thick describing these mixes. How to mix solids
is an unsolved problem, and there are conferences on the subject.
It's important to places like cookie companies, and places like that.
I think the solution is that you put in liquid, and then you can
mix it. If you make a slurry you can mix it, apparently. But as long
as it's a dry solid, you can't. That seems to be the story. This was
a major problem that we spent a lot of time and money on.
There are calibration facilities at places like Bendix, in Grand
junction, where they tried to make mixes of radioactive concrete to
calibrate gamma ray logs. It took them years to discover that they
got it wrong. There are American Petroleum Institute test pits in
Houston that are not right, because they couldn't mix it well;
they're not uniform. Mixes just don't do very well, and these test
pits where they tried to mix radioactive concrete don't work. And
so, when we built our gamma ray calibrator we used six foot high,
three foot diameter pieces of granite.
Commercial tools are calibrated in American Petroleum test

beds in Houston, in saturated limestone, and things like that. They
are small, water-filled holes, and we have dry big holes, and dry
small holes. And so, we had to simulate that. And also, we have
a much bigger range of water contents and densities. One thing that
I did invent was the idea that you had to compensate the neutron
log for density. That's not a problem in the oil industry, because
any time there's a density change there is also a water content
change, because everything is saturated. The holes they log are
deep, and also they're in places where there is a shallow water table.
So, we had to develop calibrations to account for that, and we
did. We developed ways of correcting for all those features they
don't worry about in industry. We didn't have to develop tools, we
just had to develop calibrations and corrections; ways to use those
tools. That saved lots of effort.
Carothers: This new calibrator you have is bigger, better, and
so forth compared to the old square cells. Presumably it was more
expensive also. How was the management persuaded to spend that
quarter of a million dollars?
Hearst: Actually, it ended up being more expensive than that.
But, partly it was the DOE management that spent it. I think we
succeeded because there is still the tradition of getting better data,
and because there was money in the budget, the DOE budget, to do
these things.
When I was working with Frank Morrison I was in charge of
research for the containment program. I had lunch with Frank one
day at the bowling alley at the Test Site. I said, "Frank, we don't
need any more research in the containment program. We're doing
our job, and we're not hurting. We have a budget, and there lot's
of interesting things we could do that would give us more accurate
measurements — nicer, warmer fuzzy feelings — but they don't
improve the containment of the event one bit."
Carothers: I was wondering if there was something new that
had occurred; if for some reason better numbers were needed. For
instance, perhaps the verification folks needed better numbers.
Hearst: No. There was available money, and we could show

the things that were wrong with the existing calibrator. So, we have
better data now. This business of the correction for the bound
water, that's an improvement in the correctness of the numbers,
even though it's not very important.
Carothers: Your epithermal neutron log doesn't really mea-
sure water; it measures the hydrogen that makes up the water. And
you assume that all the hydrogen is associated with water.
Hearst: That's correct.
Carothers: Well, your measurements seem to bother the
geologists, because you measure not only the free water, but the
bound water. As far as 1 know, they measure the free water. They
never measure the bound water.
Hearst: That's correct, but they could if they tried. They
measure the water in samples, and if you heat the samples hot
enough the bound water will come off.
Carothers: But the problem is that all the data in the data banks
that we have that relate to the Test Site only report the free water.
Now you're reporting free water and bound water, and so there's
always more than there is reported in the data bank.
Hearst: Not always. Only in places where there is water that
is bound, and that's in zeolitic materials, as far as I know. Or clays,
or things that have some clay in them. But yes, the neutron log
seems to give higher values than the sample data, and generally it
should. That should only happen where there's bound water. But,
we have a method for correcting for bound water. We can measure
it with nuclear magnetic resonance — from samples only, which is
a little bit cheating, as a reviewer from a journal pointed out to me.
It's cheating to interpolate between samples. There is nuclear
magnetic resonance logging, but it's never been successful. 1
recently read a proposal for something that might work, but they
aren't there yet. That tool has also existed since the sixties, but it's
never been very good, and it certainly wouldn't work in big holes.
But there is a problem there, and I'm not sure the solution is
complete; that is, that we can explain away all the differences
between the sample measurements and the log measurements. But,
we think we understand most of it, and yes, the data bank does have
just the free water, and we can now compare free water measure-
ments if we wish.
Carothers: But you do that by cheating a little bit.
Hearst: Yes. Incidently, the epithermal neutron log was a
Birdweil tool. It was abandoned by the industry, because it didn't
get enough signal, until very recently. Now epithermal neutron logs
are coming back into fashion in industry, and they are using them
in creative ways. Maybe it's just more recognition of neutron
poisons, which is the reason we used epithermal neutrons — the fact
that there are things out there that absorb thermal neutrons. And
maybe it's that industry is getting into more materials where they
care about it. But also they've found constructive ways of using the
tool.
The problem, with the neutron log in particular, and the
density log, is that our calibration at zero gap, and even at a small
gap, is excellent. But the correction for gap, when we measure some
gap, is still very poor, because we're doing that badly, somehow. I
don't know why. I think it's poor because I'm measuring the gap
at some place other than the spot where I'm making the neutron
measurement. The hole is rough, and we're making the measure-
ment a foot away from the source, because the gap measuring device
is somewhere else on the tool. That isn't right, but we don't know
how to do it otherwise. We're probably getting the water content
wrong; we're probably overestimating it in many cases.
Carothers: There are members of the Panel who have said that
they really don't care about all those numbers, and the geology,
unless there is something unusual about it. For instance, they, and
I, feel that the histograms of material properties that are presented
are meaningless, because there have been so many measurements
taken that what is at the Test Site has been bracketed, and what you
measure always falls within those limits.
Hearst: Yes. Of course. Norm Burkhard gave a paper at the
containment symposium before last about the rockpile concept —
you should just assume these numbers. I think that's quite reason-
able.
Carothers: In 1978 there was a session of the Panel called to

consider the question posed by Ink Gates, the then NVO Manager,
as to whether there were ways to reduce the containment related
costs. Without compromising the probability of successful
containment, of course.
One of the suggestions that was made in 1978 was that
Livermore should regard a large section of the areas they used in
Yucca Flat as LANL regards the Sandpile — call it the gravel pile,
or whatever. There is plenty of data to do that, and when a new hole
is drilled, just extrapolate in the data from adjacent holes. The
Livermore Laboratory, for whatever reason, has not chosen to do
that.
Hearst: In 20ax, the containment scientist wanted to do that,
and suggested that we look at the 20ax data and compare them to
the data from nearby holes. We did actually try that for that event.
Well, it turned out that in many of the lithologic units the error bars
for the measured 20ax data lay outside the error bars for the nearby
data. They didn't agree. But, so what?
Carothers: I don't believe, these days, that the CEP is the
organization that drives the data collection. You've got people who
do calculations, and to do calculations you have to have numbers,
and if you don't have numbers people criticize you for having so
many knobs to twiddle in your code that the results are meaningless.
And so, you have to have numbers. And to get the numbers you
either have to have samples, or logging tools. Samples are expen-
sive.
Hearst: And they're not very good anyhow.
Carothers: So, we have to have logging tools, so we have to
have people to do that.
Hearst: I consider it a ritual, but I earn my living at it, and it's
interesting work. As long as you're going to do it you might as well
try to do it well. Although, we wouldn't use the tools we are using
if we were starting now; we'd use higher technology. We're still
using 1960's technology in much of our stuff at the Test Site.
Carothers: With a logging tool there are two things you can do,
and presumably you could do them both at once. One is, you might
not care what the absolute value is; you might only care about where
and how the value changes. The other is that you really want to
know what the absolute value is. How do you deal with that?
Hearst: Well, in the first place, you should actually design the
tool differently for the two different uses. For almost any tool, the
larger the source-detector spacing the further you're averaging
over, so the more accurate number you're going to get, but the less
definition you're going to get of a boundary. There is a basic
problem, before you start a logging program, of deciding what you
want, and why. There's always a balance between accuracy of the
value and accuracy of the depth, which compete, and cost.
For the Soviet test site a U.S. committee got together and
decided what logs they wanted to verify Soviet tests. There was this
list of logs that were wanted, and we made decisions about the
necessary logging tools to send over to Russia. This commitee would
say, "We want these logs." And maybe, "We want them to this
accuracy," but usually not. But not, "We want them because." The
cortex people wanted them for one thing, the Geological Survey
wanted them for another thing. The first time people went over
there they spent a great deal of money, and effort, and time getting
these data. And, nobody has ever used the data, as far as I can tell.
Carothers: Why do you think that is?
Hearst: I don't know. Probably they didn't think it through.
Dick Carlson is the guy who went to Russia to do it, and the last time
I talked to him nobody had ever made any use of his work. And he
does a very good job of getting good data.
It's very difficult to persuade people, including the CEP, to
think hard about what numbers they want, to what accuracy, and
why. You can say, "I want the density to two percent accuracy over
the range." Then I come back and say, "Why? What are you going
to do with those numbers? That's very expensive. If you really
mean you want that accuracy, I probably would want to run three
different tools. But, you probably don't really mean that, because
you're not going to use those numbers that accurately."
Each person, each organization will say, "I need this measure-
ment," and they will always specify some accuracy which is good as
they could possibly use, without ever thinking how difficult they
make it to get the data, and how much more costly it is, and how
it's competingwith someone else's desires. You really have to think
about what you're going to do with those numbers.
Let me say, the CEP doesn't need accurate numbers. They're
just talking about how their grandfather did it, and 10% accuracy
would be wonderful for them. We put big error bars on the data we
present, and nobody cares.
Carothers: Well, in defense of the CEP, I constituted a
subcommittee of the CEP a number of years ago, chaired by Bill
Twenhofel. It was called the Data Needs Subcommittee. That
subcommittee came back and said the CEP didn't need various kinds
of data. The Laboratories paid no attention at all, and continued to
get those data anyway. Why? Well, they've got guys like Joe
Hearst, and John Rambo, and Fred App who are calculating various
things, and they want numbers.
Hearst: That's right. Calculators need numbers. But I think
we are getting data that are too accurate. Or too precise — they
are probably not that accurate. I think we are wasting time with too
many decimal places which nobody uses.
Carothers: You now have a tool that measures the hydrogen
in the rock, and you assume all the hydrogen is there as water, so
let's say you measure the water in the rock. Why did you develop
a tool to do that?
Hearst: We didn't. We hired it. That's the tool that was
available. But also, one of the important parameters for containment
is the total water. That's one of the key parameters, and if you need
to know numbers at all, that's one of the numbers you need to know.
When we first started we looked at the available methods of
measuring water content, and decided this was the best. But we
didn't want to measure only free water. We'll continue to report
total water and these other parameters, the porosity and saturation,
which the whole world tries to measure, by the way. The objective
of the industry in running all these logging tools is to measure
porosity and saturation. That's what the tools are built for; that's
what they were invented for. All those methods assume that the
formation is saturated with some conductive liquid.
We looked at density tools, and we just demonstrated that
these tools are worthless in the seventeen-inch holes for the
groundwater characterization program. We've shown that they're
not good. For 20ax we had problems with a density tool in a
seventeen-inch hole, and we had to build a new calibrator for it.
This was blocks of various metals like aluminum and magnesium.
That's the way you calibrate a density tool, and that's one reason
density tools are much easier to calibrate. We discovered that these
automatic, two-receiver compensated density tools get wrong an-
swers if they are tilted ever so slightly in a seventeen-inch hole.
They work all right in an eight-inch hole, which is what they were
designed for, but they have to be recalibrated for the bigger holes.
That's still being worked, but we have now demonstrated what we
surmised on 20ax; the logs are coming out wrong.
Carothers: The first log I see at the CEP is the density log. You
measure that with a gamma ray logging tool. What happened to the
dry-hole acoustic log?
Hearst: It is used, and in fact you see it, but you just don't pay
attention. It's the DHAL, and it's shown every time we show logs.
It's the acoustic velocity. First comes the caliper log, and then
comes the dry hole acoustic. That's something we invented
ourselves, because there were none in the world. We needed it for
Plowshare at the time, because we had no way of measuring acoustic
velocity except by seismic surveys.
We went to Don Rawson's back yard one day, with a couple of
acoustic transducers. Dick Carlson and I had thought of attaching
cones to transducers that we had bought. We put them on Rawson's
fireplace, and sure enough, we got a signal through the fireplace,
horizontally. Then we tried it on trees, as well. We got acoustic
signals, and we had invented a dry-hole acoustic log. The reason
nobody in the world uses it is because it's not continuous. A logging
tool to be useful in the industry, where drilling costs are immense,
must run continuously as you pull it up the hole. There are now a
couple of logs that do that, but there weren't at the time.
Carothers: Why isn't your acoustic log continuous?
Hearst: Because it has to dig into the wall of the hole. You have
to push it hard up against the wall, and push these points into the
wall. That's why nobody else ever invented it. It wasn't that we
were these brilliant geniuses; it was just that nobody else could use
it in their business.
Then we discovered a problem with it, which is why we call it
a relative measurement. In a small hole it agrees quite well with
seismic measurements of velocity. In a big hole it usually gives us
velocities that are too low. The reason for this, apparently, is that
the material near the wall of a big hole, or any hole, is broken up
by the drilling process. In the case of a big hole the depth to which
it is broken up is about the same as the depth to which the acoustic
signal goes, so we're just measuring the region which is broken up
by the drilling process.
The least time path is what you measure. So, the higher
velocity material gives you less time, but if you have to go through
a large amount of low velocity material to get to the high velocity
material, that doesn't work. The way we proved all this was to build
a tool with two receivers, which is the standard way done in the
industry. If we used the measurement between the last two
receivers, it was faster than between the source and one receiver.
That's because the passage through the broken up material is
cancelled out. Actually, in the industry now they may use up to
twenty receivers.
So, we get the acoustic velocity, and then the density, which
we get from the gamma log, and then we show the acoustic
impedance, which is the product. And that's probably why we still
show that log - - to show the impedance mismatches.
For the water content we use the epithermal neutron log, and
correct for gap between the neutron sonde and the wall of the hole.
Los Alamos does not.
Carothers: So you ought to get different answers, in the same
hole.
Hearst: Not only that, but if you look at the calibration curves,
they're different.
And, we also show the C02 content, which is still measured
from samples. And we show the clay content, which is done with
x-rays, occasionally.
Carothers: You also show the resistivity log. How do you do

that?
Hearst: Well, resistivity is the standard log in the oil industry.
That was the first log invented, and it was the only thing available
for many years. You put a source of current at the surface, and you
look at the voltages generated by it, downhole. Nowadays I think
some of them have a source of current and voltage detectors in the
hole. Some of them use induction instead, because then there's no
contact problem.
Again, it's very difficult to do in big holes. In the big, dry holes
none of the standard methods work. We did one time develop an
induction tool — huge coils for a big hole — but we never made it
standard. What we have for our dry hole resistivity log, which is the
only thing we can use in big, dry holes, is a bunch of wheels —
padded cloth wheels — saturated with copper sulphate solution.
They roll up the wall of the hole, and they're saturated with
conductive solution. They make contact with the wall of the hole.
The basic problem is that sometimes they make good contact, and
sometimes they make bad contact as they roll up the hole, and so
you get indifferent results. That's our attempt at duplicating the
standard things that are used in liquid filled holes. The current
source is in one of the wheels, and you measure the voltage between
the two wheels.
Carothers: Why is it useful for the CEP?
Hearst: Well, clay is conductive because it's has water in it, and
it's got all kinds of ions in it. So, clay is more conductive than
alluvium or tuff. Supposedly a resistivity log tells the CEP if there
is clay, but there have been a number of studies done, and none of
them link resistivity to clay. There have been a number of papers
which show there is really no connection. Nevertheless, since we
care very much about clay because of Baneberry, it is traditional to
present a resistivity log, and to worry very much if there is a very
low resistivity somewhere. Then you have to go get a sample,
despite the fact that Gayle Palawski has written a couple of papers
showing the lack of connection between log resistivity and clay
content.
The log resistivity is proportional to the conductivity of the
rock, which depends, among other things, on the amount of water,
the amount of clay, and the kind of rock. But it depends even more,
I believe, on the amount of contact between these wheels and the

wall of the hole. There are many brand names of these resistivity,
or electric, or E logs. And there are many configurations of the
electrodes, depending on who does it.
Carothers: How about the seismic velocity. How is that
measured?
Hearst: I got into that when I first got into logging. The way
it's measured now is with an air gun. There has been a lot of work
on that, and I don't know too much about how it's done today.
There are problems with getting good contact between the air gun
and the rock. The air gun puts a big pulse into the ground, at the
surface, and you have detectors clamped into the hole, downhole,
and they sense the signal. So, you're measuring the entire depth of
the hole, down to the detector.
Carothers: So if I want to know the velocity in a particular layer
I have to subtract out all the others above it. It sounds as though
the deeper I go the worse the measurement would get.
Hearst: Well, this is an acoustic signal, not going through
liquid, and you measure the arrival time of this acoustic signal, The
signal has to be some amplitude that you can see. Therefore, the
arrival time really depends on the contact between the detector and
the wall. You look at the analog trace, and you pick the arrival time.
If you have less sensitivity you will see the signal later, because the
signal is not a step function; it rises from zero to full value in some
amount of time, and when you can see the arrival depends on the
sensitivity of the detector. It's a smoothly rising signal, and you pick
the time when you can see it. That's the trouble with automatic
picking procedures; they depend on the amplitude.
So, from all this, the measured velocity depends on the contact
between the detector and the wall. Again, this is a problem with our
dry holes, which is not much of a problem in industry, where they
have liquids and the contact doesn't matter.
Carothers: There are other logs, one of which is presented to
the CEP as the gravimeter. Tell me about that.
Hearst: A gravimeter is a device that measures gravity, and it's

used routinely in the industry to make subsurface maps. I got
interested in borehole gravity when it was first being thought about
in the 1950's. The first paper was published in 1950, and I was one
of the first people to use it for anything.
The tool measures gravity in different places, and you attribute
variations to changes that are underground. The idea of measuring
rock density with borehole gravity was very intriguing to me, and as
soon as a borehole gravity meter became available I started using
one to measure density that way. You put the tool downhole, and
measure at various stations at various depths, and you can calculate
the density of uniform slabs, if you assume the world is made up of
uniform slabs.
That's exceedingly uninteresting, but if you measure the
difference between the gravity measurements and the density log,
and you believe them both, you can infer things about the structure
of the earth, underground. And that's what it's used for. There's
now a fair industry; I was at a large meeting in Chicago last year
where people were talking about improving the measurements.
There were maybe twenty or thirty experts there.
Carothers: The changes you are looking for in the gravitational
field must be very small, and so the instrument must be very
sensitive.
Hearst: It is a very sensitive instrument. One of the questions
raised at this meeting was, "Do we need greater sensitivity?" The
conclusion was that the instrument is sensitive enough to do the job.
Basically, it has a mass on an arm, and it measures the angle of the
arm as the field changes. That's the physics principle; the trick is
to get it to work in real life. People have done this, and there's one
company that does it well. The interesting conclusion of that
meeting was that what they wanted was to make the measurement
faster, and make the equipment more rugged and more reliable. But
they didn't need more sensitivity.
Carothers: How do you infer things about the structure?
Hearst: You make a calculational model of the structure,
calculate what the gravity would be with that model, from that
calculate the difference in gravity that you would see at different
depths, and compare that to what you observe. There are, of
course, infinitely many structures that would give you the same
result, and all you can do is to use the measurements to choose
between proposed models.
It has apparently worked very well in the oil industry to find oil
some distance from a hole. Again, their density logs are much more
accurate than ours, because they satisfy all the assumptions — good
contact with the hole, no gap, and it's a small hole. They can use
very small density differences to infer useful things. We can't,
because our measurements aren't that good because of our big,
rough holes. But that's what we use it for.
There is also a thing called a gravity gradient measurement,
where you're measuring the change in gravity with depth. You can
build instruments which measure the gradient, but it turns out that
gravity measurements are sensitive to one over R squared of the
mass. The gradient measurement is sensitive to one over R cubed,
and the gradiometer is so sensitive to changes in the hole configu-
ration and things like that, that you don't buy anything by building
a gradiometer.
Carothers: What's the free air gradient that is always measured
when you're doing gravity measurements?
Hearst: If you calculate the density, using a gravity meter,
there is a constant term, an additive constant, that is in the formula
for the gravimetric density. It is the change in gravity with depth
which is caused by the fact that you're getting closer to the center
of the earth. It's called the free air gradient because originally it was
the change in gravity measured as you got closer to the surface of
the earth, in the air. When we started working with this, we decided
we ought to measure this free air gradient by making gravity
measurements on a tower. Well, a lot of people in the field said that
was a bad way of doing it, because that measurement is very
sensitive to things that are close to the surface. In fact, that
measurement is now used to look for tunnels and things like that
which are near the surface.
You get a much better measurement of the free air gradient by
measuring the gravity at the surface over a wide area, and doing a
transformation to calculate the free air gradient. Norm and I finally
got persuaded by a number of publications by other people that is
indeed the correct way to do it. We were not doing it right, and so
we now do it that way. We no longer measure it directly. If you're
making measurements near the surface, yes, you should measure it

above the surface. But when you're measuring at depth, as we are,
in general you're better off by calculating it from a number of
surface measurements.
Incidently, one of the things you have to correct for is tide, and
the first time 1 asked for tide tables for the Nevada Test Site people
thought I was crazy. If you set a gravity meter out on the ground,
it changes with time, because the sun and the moon affect it. There
are earth tides, and that's what you have to correct for. That's
automatic now.
The seismic survey business is another huge industry, and it's
been a very successful one. The surveys show you where reflecting
layers are, below the surface. I have never been able to interpret
the measurements with any comfort. I think it requires a great deal
of imagination to interpret those surveys, but people do it success-
fully, and get paid very well for it. It is a universally used procedure,
and that's how all this information we get about the structure of the
earth comes to us.
It is another technique which is standard in the oil industry, but
which is exceedingly difficult to use at the Test Site. The highly
porous rocks near the surface are highly absorbing for the acoustic
signals. We used to hear stories of how some world expert in seismic
measurements would come to the Test Site and go out with our
technician. The expert would start setting off small explosions and
get no signal. Finally our technician would say, "You have to use
two sticks of dynamite instead of one detonator to get a signal here."
For many years companies would come out and produce thick
reports about why they failed..
Norm Burkhard got his Morrison Award because he was the
first person to do a successful seismic survey at the Test Site. He
used a procedure which I don't quite understand, where he used a
fairly small charge. He got it to work; it had to do with using the
right source-detector spacing, and the right type of charge, and all
sorts of things like that, which he said he learned in school.
It is difficult technique to use at the Test Site, but we do have
seismic surveys now, and they are used usually to look at cross
sections, to interpret them. A number of them have been done, but
nothing like the number that have been done in the oil patch.
They're quite expensive, but you can call in a crew, and they'll do
it. My problem is in interpreting them, but people do it. You can

see things, but figuring out what they mean is another story. Now
again, there's a huge amount of software that's been developed to
improve these things, and there's all kinds of difficulties converting
time, which is what you measure, to distance, which is what you
want.
By the way, another way people in the industry measure
porosity is velocity. These velocity logs in industry, in the right
circumstances, get porosity from velocity, if you make the right
assumptions. In a clean, water filled sandstone, all you need is the
velocity. As far as I know, every formula that's used assumes clean,
water filled sandstone. So, a velocity log is called a porosity tool,
and that's what it was developed for. There was recently an issue
of one of the journals published on the use of velocity logs to infer
porosity and permeability and things like that in rocks like granite.
Now people are starting to measure fractures with velocity. You can
do all kinds of neat things with acoustic signals, in a water filled hole.
You can actually make a picture of the wall of the hole and look at
the fractures, and things like that. You can even see some depth into
the wall, and see fractures.
Carothers: One of the things people on the Panel, from time
to time, ask about is the stress state of the rock, and about the shear
strength. What can be done there?
Hearst: We are, in fact, developing a method of measuring
strength, compressional strength. I have spent a fair amount of
time, from time to time, trying to figure out how to do that
downhole. I have not yet found a method we could field. There are
methods that I have looked at that are used, even some that are done
in the tunnels, that are very difficult to do remotely. For example,
putting two pins in the wall of the hole, measuring the distance
between them very accurately somehow, then taking a saw and
making a slot in the wall between those two pins, and then measuring
the distance between them again. We've spent some money looking
at things like that. One of the major problems is that the borehole
causes a major change to the in-situ stress, and so whatever you
measure in the wall of the borehole may not have a great deal to do
with what's out in the rock. But we've looked at a number of
methods for that.
Carothers: I think of it because one of the things people are

touting these days, maybe correctly, maybe not, is the following
argument. There isn't, necessarily, any residual stress field around
the cavity. There would be in a uniform medium, or world, but we
don't shoot shots in such a world. Blocks move, here and there, and
what really contains shots is hydrofractures, which drive out into the
rock a short distance, dump a lot of steam, cool the cavity down,
and that's it.
Hearst: That's quite possible. Now, we have worked on
measuring shock induced stress. In fact, we just had a failure on the
Bristol event, where we got numbers that were mostly strain. It is
exceedingly difficult to measure shock induced stress. Part of the
problem is that the shock damages the gauges. The biggest problem
is that it's very easy to measure a stress in the stress transducer, but
relating that to the stress in the rock is very difficult indeed. If you
could, in fact, put the transducer in direct, intimate contact with the
rock, you could do it. But you can't. You have to drill a hole, you
have to put the transducer in a package, you have to put the package
is some kind of stemming material, and all of that makes a big
difference in the measurement. We've worked quite hard on that.
We've developed procedures for reducing the data, and they
haven't worked very well either.
Carothers: How about measurements where you could say,
"Yes, there is a residual stress field, because before the shot I
measured the stress in this region, and thirty seconds after the shot,
here's what that stress field was, and it was different."
Hearst: We've had some little hints of that in these measure-
ments, but one of the major problems is that every stress transducer
you can build is also affected by strain. You can't distinguish
between stress and strain easily, and so we have not been able to
prove that what we have seen is actually residual stress. We have
seen signals that have stayed up for long periods of time, but we
can't prove what they are.
Carothers: As contrasted to post-shot stress, there is a lot of
interest, by people who are interested in the hydrofracing model, in
in-situ stress.
Hearst: Attempts have been made, and papers have been

published, even about work at the Test Site. Again, it's something
that's done routinely in small holes in mines, where you can get at
the rock, where you can drill a small hole and put an instrument in
it. Even then there are difficulties.
While we have not developed a method for measuring in-situ
stress remotely, we are developing a method to measure strength.
It's very difficult, again, to calibrate. It is known that the penetra-
tion of a projectile into a material, such as a rock, depends on the
strength of the rock, among other things. We did a series of
experiments in concretes, and things like that, where we demon-
strated this. And, there's been a great deal of work done on it
because of penetrating weapons, by Sandia and Waterways Experi-
ment Station. They have developed a whole bunch of complicated
formulas for calculating the penetration.
I discovered that a formula developed in 1 765, or something
like that, by Euler, was much better than any of the formulas
developed in modern times, and he used very simple math. At any
rate, we now have a device, built, which is capable of being put down
hole. It fires a projectile into the wall of the hole, by remote
control, measures the deceleration, and then retracts. It can then
be used to repeat. This device exists, but the equipment to lower
it down the hole doesn't exist. There are a lot of difficulties with
it.
One of the major problems, of course, is in calibration. You
can calibrate it in concrete fine, and that's what we're working on.
Calibrating it in rock is extremely difficult. We're going to take it
down to the tunnels, and we've done this once before with a kluge.
Now we're doing it with the real apparatus. The problem, of course,
is knowing the right answer. When you fire it into a rock, and
measure the decceleration, what is the strength of that rock? You
get a core sample, and you measure the strength of that core sample.
You hope that if you measure it six inches from the place you're
measuring with the tool that it is at least similar. But if you take two
or three core samples, and you measure the strength of them,
they're wildly different. And if you shoot in two or three places in
this piece of rock, you get different penetrations. I think we'll be
lucky if we get a factor of two accuracy; we'll be happy if we get a
factor of two accuracy. But this tool I am very pleased with. It's
calibrating pretty well in grouts, and I'm looking forward to doing
it this summer in the tunnels. It's a lovely piece of apparatus.
Carothers: Maybe the strength varies by a factor of two over
short distances.
Hearst: Quite possibly. At any rate, we have actually built this
apparatus, which is on wheels at the moment. We have designed a
device to lower it. It's designed to work in a big hole, to clamp up
against the wall of a big hole and fire the projectile into the wall.
John Rambo uses the drilling rate as a measure, of some kind,
of the strength, but it also measures other properties. Among other
things it depends on how the drillers are working, and how much
weight is on the bit, and how sharp the bit is. But it is another
measure.
John also believes that the velocity is another measure of the
strength. Remember that I told you that the velocity depends on
how much the rock is broken up by the drilling? Well, if it's broken
up less, it's stronger, and so the velocity is higher. A lot of other
things will make the velocity higher also. We may have to use all of
these methods together to infer a strength. But since strength makes
a great deal of difference in a calculation, it's important to get it.
207
8
Energy Coupling and Partition
A nuclear detonation produces ten to the twelth calories per

kiloton, by definition. All of that energy is deposited in the earth,
and ultimately, over a long period of time, results in making the
earth as a whole somewhat warmer. Over the short term, the energy
deposition can cause many different things to take place. The
question of what that energy deposition does, and what fraction goes
into each phenomenon is an open one, subject to many variables.
Some amount causes surrounding rock to vaporize and to melt.
Another amount causes the surrounding material to move, giving
rise to motions in the ground. Some causes open pores to collapse,
some gives rise to stresses in the rock, some is carried away by
elastic waves that propagate to large distances. The amount of the
energy that goes into each of the various channels determines the
phenomena that are produced by the detonation. Some are easily
seen; that which goes into the seismic wave can be detected world-
wide. The amount that melts rock stays close to the origin; the rock
cools, solidifies, and can only be seen if a costly reentry is made to
the vicinity of the detonation point.
App: When you are looking at the coupling of the energy, and
ground motions, there is the issue of how much energy actually gets
coupled into the rock, as opposed to what remains behind in the
cavity. This deals with the shock Hugoniot and the release proper-
ties of the vaporized rock. Butkovitch, in 1 974, determined that
there are large differences in the kind of energy coupling between
low and high density rock. He looked at the refractories in the melt
puddle and assumed perfect mixing, and from that inferred how
much melt had been generated. That gave a value for how much
energy had stayed behind in the cavity. What he showed was that
for a dense rock you get twice as much, or maybe more than twice
as much, of the energy into the shock wave as you do for a shot in
low density, like 1.6 grams per cc, rock. And so, starting off one
looks like a bigger bomb than the other, but it doesn't really change
the waveform characteristics, just the amplitude of the signal. It
looks like a bigger bomb.
Now, the porosity, and a number of other things change how

large the bomb appears to be; how much energy goes into the solid
rock. One can make the argument that there could be a factor of
two in how much energy goes into the stress wave, just from the
Butkovitch work. We should be able to go back and systematically
look at cortex data to determine the hydrodynamic coupling for
different materials. That's essentially what cortex is sampling - - the
energy that goes into the shock wave. If we could combine that with
additional rad chem analyses of melt puddles, we might be able to
come up with some relationship between such coupling and the
working point material.
The other part is, as we move farther out, there's this other
phase of coupling, where the strength of the materials comes into
effect and changes both the wave shape and the amplitude. That's
the regime where the properties of the rock can modify the wave
form to make it look like maybe something else, another type of
source.
Carothers: Does that matter to containment?
App: I think it matters. Anything we can learn about how
much energy gets coupled into the ground, and how it gets coupled
in, I think is relevant to containment. If a bomb is going to put twice
as much energy into ground shock because it's in this material rather
than in that one, that's relevant. It's relevant to containment
because we worry about the yield of the bomb, and that's the yield
of the bomb, as far as the ground shock is concerned.
Higgins: There was a recent tunnel experiment that was
identical in almost every respect to a test that had been fired six
months before. The results show that the same explosive yield, in
the same configuration, created a seismic signal that was one-half as
large, or even a little bit less than half as large, in one case as in the
other. That doesn't disturb anyone, because everyone knows that
the seismic wave is kind of a vague and various thing. But when
people began to examine the close-in strong motion measurements,
they too were half as large, or less. And, as were the accelerations,
as was the tunnel damage. If you went to a distance like a hundred
meters from each of these two explosions, in one case there was
nearly total destruction of everything. The tunnel was collapsed,
and so forth. In the other case there was almost no observable
effect; there were displacements, but they were modest.
Energy Coupling and Partition 209
As the data are examined, one of the suggestions, and it looks

now to me to be the most likely suggestion, is that the mechanisms
for coupling energy, in that region where melting and vaporization
was going on, was very different in the two cases. If you think of
the total explosion, very close to the explosion rock is melted and
heated to extremely high temperatures. So, there is a part of the
total explosion energy that goes into heating the immediate sur-
roundings, and that part goes into forming the cavity. There's
another fraction of the total energy that goes into deformation of
the rock in an elastic-plastic sense. And finally, way out at longer
distances, there's an elastic wave which creates a seismic wave.
We've long said that about fifty percent or so of the total bomb
energy goes into the thermal cavity region, that another large
fraction, also about fifty percent, goes into the plastic deformation
region, and a very tiny part - - one percent or less - - goes into the
seismic signal. What these two shots, and the measurements since
then, suggest is that this roughly equal partition between the molten
and the plastic deformation is variable, and a lot more variable than
we thought. And that, in turn, affects the one percent or so that's
left over for the seismic wave by a rather large factor.
For example, look at the amount of energy that is stored in
what we call the containment cage. Take from one cavity radius to
three cavity radii and say that is the containment cage region.
That's a very crude set of definitions, but if you put two bars of
stress in that spherical shell, that amounts to thirty percent of the
initial device energy, using the compression curves that we are
measuring. That amount of energy in the containment cage is a
significantly large fraction of the device energy, and things that go
on to perturb it are big things, not little things.
Carothers: What would lead to variability between the ratio of
device energy that goes into cavity formation and the elastic-plastic
type of deformation?
Higgins: There are quite a lot of things, it turns out. We have
started to look at that, but I don't think the subject has been
adequately studied, certainly not exhaustively. The most obvious
thing that changes the ratio is irreversible pore collapse. Suppose
you built the test medium out of fiberglass foam, or frothy pumice-
like blocks, with fifty percent air-filled void. The crushing of those
voids would consume huge amounts of energy. Of course, the
material gets very hot when it's compressed, but we don't measure
temperature from a distance, so we don't know how hot it gets. All
we know is how much of the compressive wave got transmitted, and
if you're crushing the material, you're not transmitting any wave.
So, air-filled voids are one thing that can change the ratio.
There are other kinds of things, such as phase transitions. Every-
body is familiar with the ice cube in the drink, and the fact that you
have a phase transition going on. It keeps the drink cold even
though there is almost no volume change. The same thing happens
in an even more pronounced way in some solids, like rocks. There
are phase transitions that go on where minerals hydrate, or dehy-
drate, or melt, or vaporize, or change from loose open structures to
dense compact structures. A common one is the transition of
carbon to diamond, where there is a big density change. Silica does
the same thing. It goes from an orthorhombic eightfold symmetry
to cubic symmetry at very high pressures, and the volume change
that accompanies that is like a factor of two. So the amount of
energy that can be stored, just by going from an open loose structure
to a high density structure is huge.
Carothers: You mean that just to generically call the Rainier
Mesa rocks 'tuff doesn't tell you what you need to know?
Higgins: Right, and it doesn't even tell you what you need to
know if you identify it as being Tunnel Bed Four, because it turns
out that the degree of zeolitization, the minerals of Tunnel Bed
Four, are quite different in different places.
Carothers: So, to say that you have Tunnel Bed Four here, and
in a different location you also have Tunnel Bed Four, as the
geologists do, is not adequate to determine what's going to happen
when the device goes off, at least close-in.
Higgins: That's a conclusion that appears to be true. I've got
an analogy, which isn't exact. The business of containment, the
interaction of a nuclear explosion with the earth, is somewhat like
atomic physics was at the turn of the century. People were
beginning to discover the difference between the orbital electrons
in the various atoms. Then they discovered there was a nucleus, and
there was the atomic structure. Then there is the nuclear structure,
and they discovered that makes a difference; all nuclei aren't just
the same nuclei. There are levels in those nuclei and there are
particles in there. And then, there are particles in the particles. I

think that going from the picture of the earth as homogeneous is just
like the transition when they said, "You know, the atom isn't a
pudding. It's more complicated than that."
We're at the point of knowing things are more complicated,
but not exactly what all of the complications are. That is still an
open question. It's not open to the degree that we don't have some
pretty good containment rules, but it is open to the degree that we
can't say we can test in every conceivable situation with complete
certainty. There are questions that have to be answered in every
case. I think we can answer them. I don't see any insurmountable
technological problems, but it's more complicated than we first
thought, by quite a bit.
The amount of melt is one of the interesting numbers to look
at. I really do believe, and I think most of us in the business believe,
that energy is conserved. Ten to the twelfth calories in a glacier, or
in the Greenland ice cap, will melt a fixed amount of ice, and it
doesn't make a lot of difference if it does it by crushing or whatever.
One of the rules of thermodynamics is that the paths are not
important; the end states will be the same no matter what path you
take. There is a certain amount of ice transformed into a certain
amount of water. If you know the total energy, you know the total
amount of water regardless of the path.
When you consider those kinds of things, and then you observe
such different results in the seismic signal from two different events,
you have to say, "It's clear that there have been differences in the
thermodynamic path, and that must be related to the materials
involved, and in the structure." We know that the total has to be
the same.
Take the differences between P tunnel, and N and T tunnel. N
and T turn out to be almost twins, but P is different. When we ask
the question, "Well, what is different?" what turns out to be
different is the degree of zeolitization, although the stratigraphic
units are the same. That's a fancy way of saying to what degree the
original volcanic glass has been transformed into some kind of a clay
mineral. There are units in both tunnels that have the same amount
of clay formation, but the clay occurs at different levels in the
stratigraphic section. In other words, the geologists have layered
the cake differently than the physics does.
Carothers: There was a man, Rick Warren, who gave a

presentation at one of the CEP meetings about identifying the rock
structures by mineral analysis. He felt that was the way you should
identify the layers. His didn't correspond to the conventional units,
but his point was that he could tell you that the rock at this depth
in this hole is like that rock at a different depth in that hole.
Higgins: Right. DNA had him to do a special set of examina-
tions, and it was through his work that this analysis of the P tunnel
versus N tunnel came out. There are like fivefold differences in the
amounts of some of the minerals.
Carothers: Might one say, "Over and over again we learn that
the earth is an inhomogeneous body of materials. There's no reason
to be surprised by differences in the response of the rocks to shots
in different locations, because if you don't think of the rocks just as
Tunnel Beds Four, and instead look at their mineralographic makeup,
you're in a different medium in those locations?"
Higgins: That's right. That's what you would conclude. And
that has to do with the history of the two areas we've been trying
to understand, and their history with water. One is closer to the
edge of the old original pile of ash.
In the first years of underground testing the radiochemists had
a difficlt time determining the fraction of the yield that resulted
from the fusion reactions. The samples obtained from the post-shot
drill-backs sufficed for measuring the number of fission reactions,
but the number of fusion reactions was difficult problem. In this
circumstance other methods of measuring the yield, or energy
release, of the device were sought.
The yield could, in principle, be determined by measuring the
velocity of the outgoing shock wave in the earth materials surround-
ing the device. Small diameter holes drilled near the emplacement
hole were used to place various instruments in, hopefully, known
locations with respect to the device so the shock velocity could be
measured. Information about the behavior of the medium itself
could also be determined by instruments placed in the same satellite
holes to measure the pressures and accelerations produced by the
shock as it passed
Two of the important tools for obtaining information about

shock velocities are what are called the "slifer," and the "corrtex."
In the slifer, a long length of coaxial cable acts as the inductance in
an oscillator circuit. When the cable is placed in an environment
where the cable is progressively crushed, and thereby electrically
shorted by some external pressure, the frequency of the circuit
changes. Measurement of the frequency of the oscillator as a
function of time will then give the rate at which the cable is being
electrically shortened. In the corrtex there is also a long length of
cable, whose length is determined by sending short electrical pulses
down it and measuring the time it takes for them to reflect from the
shorted end.
SLIFER - Shorted Location Indicator by Frequency of Electri-
cal Resonance.
CORRTEX - Continuous Reflectometry for Radius versus
Time Experiment.
Bass: I first got involved with underground measurements
when I was asked to head an instrumentation section to make the
close-in earth motion measurements on Scooter. We had stations
at 25 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet, 2 0 0 feet, in vertical drill holes at shot
depth. Then we had some instruments above them, making some
vertical measurements, and then we had a few surface measure-
ments. Scooter provided absolutely fantastic data that probably is
not equaled today.
Carothers: Were these the first attempts at such measure-
ments?
Bass: No. There were very good measurements on Rainier.
Bill Perret did those. Rainier was an outstanding experiment and it
was very well measured. Actually, some of the measurements were
fantastic. Go back and look at the work that Fran Porzell did. He
had left Los Alamos, and was at Armour Research at that time.He
was attempting to measure hydrodynamic yield, and he had mea-
surements that are now on what I am going to say is the cutting edge
of what Los Alamos is now trying to do . There was a Doppler
system radar on Rainier to measure the shock wave arrival which
actually was as good, or just as far advanced, as Los Alamos is doing
on the hydrodynamic yield programs today.
Also, on Scooter we tried to make pressure measurements, and

we got next to nothing. We put in a few hydrophones, which are
underwater pressure gauges, which we tried to adapt to under-
ground, in soil, measurements. These hydrophones, which were
made by Atlantic Research Corporation, were all Navy type equip-
ment. They were a little batch of barium titanate crystals, I think,
in a sack, and they drove a cathode follower, which was an emitter
follower which drove a line driver. We tried to put those in a
pressure chamber, and tried to calibrate them. We then put the
gauge, which looked like your finger with a little bulb at the bottom,
in a plastic sack of sand. We then put this in a metal frame, lowered
it down the hole, and poured matching grout around it. The idea
was that we would activate the crystals in the chamber. The return
was zero.
The reason the return was zero was that during the long period
of time when Scooter misfired, and then finally went, we had snows
and rains and everything else on the Test Site. The emitter-follower
boxes were right at the surface, and they all got wet, and shorted
out. As project officer 1 was at fault for not having them moved.
That shot went about the first week of October, 1 believe, instead
of July, for reasons we have talked about.
Brownlee: Right after the moratorium 1 was doing hydrody-
namic yield measurements in satellite holes. Ray Blossom picked the
site for the shot, and Bob Newman told them how deep to drill the
hole, using his little scaling law. Then I came along and said, "Okay,
let's drill a hole here, and a hole there, and a hole over there, so for
that yield range 1 can measure the hydrodynamic yield."
In order to do that I would go talk to the designers, and spend
time with them. 1 would say, "You've got this down as 10 kt.
What's the chances it will go 1 5 kt? What's the chances it will go
five? What's the chance it will only give us a hundred tons?" I would
listen to everything I was told, and 1 would say to myself, "Well, they
say it's going to go ten, but it's clearly not going to do that." So,
I would locate the satellite holes so if it went three kilotons I could
get a good yield measurement. So, I'd have one or two in close, and
do the third one farther out. I would put the holes where 1 was
guessing would be right for the yields. We didn't have a design yield
or a max cred yield then. We had a design yield in the sense that
they were hoping it would give ten kt, or whatever. Newman would
have the hole for that. But that's not necessarily the yield 1 would
use to place the satellite holes.
Carothers: If you were trying to get the yields hydrodynami-
cally, that must have made the question of what the material around
the shot point was important to you.
Brownlee: Oh, yes. That's where I came up with the four
standards. There is a supersonic part of the arrival time curve, then
it becomes sonic. A n d so, the shot would tell me what the sonic
velocity of the material was. I had these curves, four altogether. I
would say, "Is the sonic velocity most like this one?" Then I would
use that one to derive the yield.
On one shot the curve would go sonic at this place, and then
I could say, "This is very wet." On another shot it would curve over
at another place, and I could say, "This is very dry." So, when I'd
gotten enough facts I could say, "There, that's what it does. The
shot itself is telling me the sonic velocity." So, I was able to
construct a particular curve. Now, after you've done that, you can
go back and restructure all the other curves and say, "Well, I can
have any kind of equation of state here, depending on how much
water is there." Then you do the trial and error fitting, and let that
try to tell you the yield. I abandoned the four standard curves in
time, but I needed data to show me that.
But you're exactly right. The reason I got interested in the
water content, and what the rocks were like, and the porosity, and
whether the porosity was filled with water or not, was in order to
determine the yield. Hindsight says we were doing a better job of
determining the yields than we had any right to expect. They were
really pretty good, but I didn't know that. We finally stopped
because the rad chem people said they were getting the yields well
enough. It costs money to drill those satellite holes, so we finally
stopped it. On the other hand, it's a good way to get the yield, and
you really can do a pretty good job in a medium that you
understand.
But remember, it's the shot itself, when you shoot it, that tells
you what the medium is like. We never measured, ahead of time,
the correct sonic velocity. We determined it from the shot, and it
was always different from the pre-shot measurement.
That was the point I was trying to make at one of the CEP to
these lads who were sitting there, who persist in believing that what
they measure is the truth. They insist upon that, but it's never been
true when you find out what the truth really is; it's never right. But
there's the, "That's what I went to school to learn. I did all the
things they told me to do, so this must be the number." So, you're
quite right. It was the hydrodynamic yield measurements for those
earliest shots, more than for containment, that forced me to
understand something about the material.
Bass: After the moratorium Los Alamos was drilling a lot of
holes in Nevada. They would drill a hole, and we would locate three
satellite holes for making hydrodynamic yield measurements. Bob
Brownlee had a formula to locate them, and we were working in the
sonic region, because we thought that was the only place we could
really understand. Also, in that region we were far enough away
that the range errors - - the errors in distance between where we
thought the device was and where our instruments were - - weren't
killing us. But, every now and then something would happen, and
they would end up putting a higher yield device down than they had
originally planned. So, we would be in the hydrodynamic region,
and we started getting some hydrodynamic data out of our first
satellite hole, which was supposed to have been at around ten
kilobars. Sometimes we were getting up to a hundred kilobars, or
even two or three hundred kilobars.
When Bill Ogle said, "Let's start this hydro yield program," he
gave Sandia carte blanc. Sandia and Los Alamos started their
program, and Sandia did all the experimental work on that. The
people in Livermore went off on their own, and started their own
program. At one time Johnny Foster came to Sandia and asked
Sandia to get involved in the Livermore program, but it never got
implemented. It was probably a good thing, because I think there
was too much work to be done as it was.
Carothers: It was expensive to drill those instrument holes, and
Livermore gave up such measurements as the chemists developed
their own methods for better yield measurements.
Bass: Los Alamos quit it too, because we got into a medium
that was badly layered and we weren't getting decent results. The
results were garbage, so we all quit the thing. But, before that we
did get some useful data. Our agreement was this - - we would
provide Los Alamos with time of arrival information, if they would

let us make, in their facility, pressure measurements. Chabai and I
wanted the pressure measurements. They wanted the time of arrival
data. Art Cox, Bob Brownlee, and I worked on this constantly. I
was at Los Alamos every week during that period.
We were also working rather closely with Fred Holzer at that
time, on Madison. He had a big containment program there.
Madison had a huge room, and a drift off to the side. He wanted
to find out how the energy partitioned down that, and could you
close off the tunnel with that drift. He courteously invited us out
to look at the whole thing, and go over all his data.
Then he came up to us at the CP one day and said, "I've got
something you ought to get involved with," and he handed us a
drawing of the slifer that they had come up with. We looked at it
and said, "This is outstanding," because at that time we were using
peizoelectric crystals, rather than a cable. That's the same thing the
Russians are using today, although they finally went to a slifer.
We immediately started putting down slifers. I think the first
one went down within a week. I took the drawing down to our trailer
area, to an electronics guy, and said, "Hey, build us one." He said,
"I'm not going to put those tubes down there," because it was a
hard-tube oscillator. In about twelve hours he had one working with
two transistors. There's just an oscillator and a line driver; that's all
there is to it. That is still the same slifer design that Sandia uses to
this date. We have never changed that design, from that day in the
CP in 1962. When the Soviets looked at that they said, "You guys
are kidding. Is this how you measure hydrodynamic yield? You use
this?" because the transistors were circa ' 6 1 .
We put slifers down right away, and we loved them. We used
them ten times as much as Livermore ever did, and we still use them
to this day. There are two slifers installed on the outside of the pipe
on all DNA events, to measure pipe flow.
Brownlee and I put them on the inside of a pipe one time only.
AI Graves gave us Mataco, and said we could do anything we wanted
on Mataco, because he wanted to know if they could do these line-
of-sight experiments. One of the things we did was to put a slifer
cable inside the pipe, and one outside. We found that they read
exactly the same thing.
So we started using these slifers. Taking the slifer data, and the
Hugoniots of the earth materials, you can do the integrations, and
put them all together, and you will end up with a beautiful pressure-
distance curve. And it matches the pressure data. The whole thing
falls together. It really falls together when you do it for granite. You
can end up with a pressure curve from two megabars down to two
hundred kilobars, in granite, from the slifer cables, that match the
pressure data. It's a very good test, and the sanity check is solid.
Those all go together, the pressure data, the slifer data, and
everything else we've ever put together.
So, we were making these time-of-arrival measurements on Los
Alamos events, and compiling the data. That's one thing I've always
done through the years. I say, "All these individual data are poor,
but when you put them together, there's some sense to them." And
Brownlee's a real advocate of this; you better believe the data,
because they're telling you something. They're always telling you
something.
We started putting together the data we had taken on the LASL
shots where we were in the hydrodynamic region and we discovered,
Io and behold, it didn't make any difference what we were shooting
in. There was a straight line function in everything. If we were in
granite, if we were in alluvium, if we were in tuff, it made no
difference in the strong shock region. All these materials worked
the same way. What we had found is now called the Universal
Relation. Now, marble is an exception. There are exceptions
always to rules like that.
And this has been ignored, I think for one reason. The
Livermore jealousy concerning the Los Alamos hydro yield program
has been incredible. Livermore has been very negative on that
program from the very beginning, because they have been oriented
more toward seismic measurements for yield. So, they have not
been much in favor of the cortex measurement program and the
slifer program.
Incidently, I think cortex is the greatest sales job in the history
of the program. If the Lord above had told you how to do this, he
would have said, "Cortex first, and then slifer is the improvement
over cortex," because slifer is continuous, and cortex is discrete,
and not too solid. Now, the new cortex gets rid of this problem by
looking for the phase change of a standing wave on a cable. Fran

Porzell had done that on Rainier. It didn't work on Rainier, but it
was the same thing.
We first started the idea of using slifers for hydrodynamic yield
on the PNE and the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, using this Universal
Relation. It says that shock propagation in most geologic materials
can be described by one power-law formula. It's called the
Universal Relationship, or the Los Alamos Relationship. AI Chabai
and I developed it, and Los Alamos has used it ever since.
We were pushing this as the way to measure the yield of PNE
events. The reason you have to use the Universal Relationship on
PNE's is that you don't know where the source is. The treaty we
had, and still do have, with the Soviet Union says that the canister
can be, then ten meters long, now twelve meters long. And, they
can put the device anywhere they want in those twelve meters.
Carothers: You mean, you don't know where the center of
energy is.
Bass: That's right. That's a better way to put it. So, your
system has to tell you where the center of energy is. This is where
you use the Universal Relation, because you know what the slope of
the function must be. All you have to do is make a measurement
in the emplacement hole, although it also works in a satellite hole.
In the emplacement hole you don't need to know where the source
is below you, but you do know from the Universal Relation that the
slope of the shot curve has to be a certain value. Theoretically it
should be 0.4, on a log-log plot. It turns out it 0.459, or something
like that, because theory doesn't work here. It's just strictly
accidental empiricism, or quackery. That's a proper dictionary
definition of an empiric, isn't it - - a quack? Anyhow, the Universal
Relationship works beautifully for this.
So, that's where PNE monitoring became possible, because we
could, through the use of the Universal Relationship, and with the
proper spacing of the cable above the canister so we would know we
were in the hydrodynamic region, get the yield for any event we
wanted to measure. If you had a satellite hole that went deeper than
the device emplacement, that would tell you directly, but at that
time there were not going to be any satellite holes. Everything on
the PNE treaty was main hole, because it costs a million dollars to
drill a satellite hole.
m, M m
Rambo: I was hired on, in November of 1963, by John Ellis,

who was then in charge of a small group developing, as a group, how
to measure slifer yields for the nuclear test program. As I got
familiar with the operation 1 would design where they would be
located. 1 was one of the first people to say, "We've got to run the
cable below the working point, so we can see the first crush on it."
We wanted the first arrival because the elevation of that first arrival
is where we thought the shot horizon would be. That was of interest
for us because it would tell where the working point was, and there
was a lot of uncertainty in that.
Carothers: You know where the emplacement hole started, on
the surface, and it may wander a bit, but not much. Then you know
where the device itself was put, rather accurately.
Rambo: Fairly accurately, although in the early days it wasn't
always stated if they changed that location, and other times that
information did not get back to us. On the satellite holes we thought
the location accuracy was about two feet per thousand feet of depth,
on the average. The Sperry Sun people did those surveys. They
would run two or three runs, and we'd get different answers from
each run. Two feet per thousand feet was average, but it could
exceed that. You could get systematically bad information. Occa-
sionally you'd get one survey that was five or six feet different from
the others.
So, there was some uncertainty there. There was also some
uncertainty in the depth, and there was the distance from the
emplacement hole to the satellite hole; you had to make sure that
was correct. One time I discovered that my data wouldn't fit no
matter what I tried to do to it. So I went back to an aerial
photograph, found the size of the pad, and then was able to
determine how far away the satellite hole was. The surveyors had
made a ten foot error. Then I was able to analyze that data. That
was the kind of thing you could run up against from time to time.
In those days we were usually using one satellite hole. There
was one or two shots that had three holes, but it was usually just one,
and we didn't always know where the satellite hole was. So, there
were surveys, and sometimes there were errors in where the cables
might be located. So, we would make corrections after the fact to
our data.
Carothers: After people told you what the yield was supposed
to be?
Rambo: I've been accused of that quite often, so that question
doesn't come as a surprise.
The results were quite sensitive to separation. A few feet made
a difference. At the low yields we were doing in those days, it was
very sensitive. In fact, I could easily be in the thirty to fifty percent
range sometimes, certainly thirty percent. When you made the
statement that if I knew the yield I could determine a good slifer
yield, sometimes I did that, but more or less to determine what went
wrong with the experiment. I was looking for systematic problems.
I'd look back at the yield, and I'd say, "In order to get this yield,
what would I have needed to change?" And so I would learn
something about the experimental procedure, hopefully, to im-
prove it. But I can't say I was completely oblivious to the fact that
I sometimes knew what the yield was before I published the yield
that I had gotten.
Carothers: If you were going to do that kind of measurement,
you needed to know something about the material properties of the
medium in which you were shooting - - whether it was tuff, or
alluvium, or below the water table, or whatever. How did you get
that kind of information? When you started the slifer measurements
they weren't logging the holes were they?
Rambo: We weren't getting anything. The geologists would go
down, look at the cuttings, and say things like, "There's rocks down
there," or, "This is highly porous stuff". They weren't very good
descriptions for what I needed.
We had four or five curves that we would compare our data to,
to get the yield. It's called similar explosion scaling. These curves
were labeled Wet, Damp, Dry, Very Dry. The tail of these curves
would fold over flatter if they were dry, and they would be steeper
at the end if they were wet. I would take these curves, and I would
compare the tails of these things after the fact, and with some
knowledge that we were in a wet hole or a dry hole area, I would ask
the geologists for what specific information they had. From that I
would try to figure out which curve was the one I was to use. It is
not the best way, and it is certainly not as good a way as we do
nowadays.
Carothers: Bob Brownlee did measurements of that sort for

some time for Los Alamos. Did you have any contact with him at
all?
Rambo: No, 1 don't think so; not in those days. The curves
I was just mentioning came from Los Alamos, and they had come
from calculations they had done. We inherited those nomencla-
tures. We were at least self-consistent in terms, between the
Laboratories.
Carothers: Why did you use satellite holes, which are expen-
sive? Why not put the slifer cables down the emplacement hole?
Rambo: We did. We did them in both places, but what was
happening during those days was we were usually measuring fairly
low yields, and there were often large diagnostic line-of-sight pipes,
at that time. Close in to the device, where you needed to be with
the slifer cables, there was a lot of radiation and energy that was
going up to hit doghouses and things like that. Often what I'd see
on the slifer cables was doghouses exploding. I could see all this
detail going on, but it wasn't very conducive to doing a good yield
measurement. So, I kept pushing for satellite holes. That was an
additional expense, and I think toward the end of this early era they
were trying to save money, and the other methods of yield
determination were getting better, so slifers sort of ceased to exist
at Livermore, probably around 1964 to 1965.
Carothers: What's the difference between a slifer and a cortex
measurement?
Rambo: Really nothing, in terms of what the data looks like.
In a slifer, the cable is the inductive leg of a tuned oscillator. When
the shock crushes the cable, and shorts it, the inductance changes,
which changes the oscillator frequency. Los Alamos, at a later time,
decided to use a slightly different way to measure the cable length.
What they would do was send an electrical signal down the cable, let
it reflect off the crush point, and come back. So, they would
measure the transit time. This is what the cortex method is.
Essentially we measured the same thing, but by slightly different
methods.
There are some things that a slifer does in sensing a change

more rapidly in the speed of the crush going up the cable, because
you don't have to wait for the transit time of the signal. There are
some advantages to the slifer, and they're still being used on the
tunnel shots. I am not sure which method is better. I think cortex
is a little bit freer of noise, and in some instances, because the
technology of electronics have changed, it's better in that sense. It
suffers from the same problems we had in the early days of doing
slifers. It's just that when they brought more information to bear
on the problem in these recent times, it's a little easier to get better
solutions from the data. But there are still problems that are very
hard to deal with.
I have looked at a lot of data where I would see a time of arrival
up above the device which seemed shorter than it did off on the
horizontal, where we were looking at the horizontal arrival of the
Shockwave. Then after a while, the two curves from those locations
would come together. This was two separate cables, of course. I
saw that more often than not. If there was a baffle, or some sort of
metal plate, or something like that above the device, it looked like
the shock was coming from that source. Or if there was a large
opening for a brief distance above the device you could almost see
that looking like a source.
So, there was this problem of where the center of energy
looked like it was, very close-in. People like to measure close-in,
near the center; the material properties don't matter as much there
because of the very high pressures. But what does matter is the
minute geometry of what's going on with the explosion, in terms of
where the energy flows. So, you've got a trade-off taking place at
that point. It's almost better to look at the data farther out, but at
that point you're worried about material properties more.
If you looked at the entire curve on these things, sometimes
you could determine what errors you were looking at. If your cable
was further down than you thought it was, you could see that kind
of error, because it was a constant difference from what you should
be reading. And if you were comparing it to an emplacement hole,
sometimes you could determine that. If the satellite hole were
farther away than you thought, you could compare it to the
emplacement hole, and sometimes you would get a feel for that kind
of an error. These were all techniques, and some of them I had
developed in the early days, like looking at where the first crush
point was on the satellite hole to try and iron out some of those
difficulties. A lot of that is now taking place more professionally
with current methods than I was able to do.
The earth in which the energy of the detonation is deposited is

not an infinite, homogeneous material, unfortunately for those who
would calculate and predict what will occur. The various layers of
rocks of different properties, the faults, the presence or absence of
water all affect the ground response. One example is the surface
ground motion produced by an event called Tybo, which was
detonated in an emplacement hole in Pahute Mesa. The surface
motion, and the measured ground shock was, unexpectedly, the
highest that had ever been seen at the Test Site. John Rambo tried
to model the geologic setting, and in his calculations determine why
this should have been so.
Rambo: I started to wonder about these peculiar ground
motions when there were two shots that were fired quite close
together physically, and also in time. One was nine kilotons, and
it was located below the water table at about six hundred and eighty-
eight meters. The upper one was at about four hundred and thirty-
some meters, and it was about thirty-five kilotons. The interesting
thing was that the free surface velocity for the deeper one was about
one point one meters per second, and the free surface velocity for
the upper one, which was higher in yield and much closer to the
surface, was about one meter per second. These were actually
measured, and because there was about thirty seconds between the
detonations it was easy to see separate signals.
Carothers: The thirty-five kilotons closer to the surface gave
less motion than the nine kilotons deeper down?
Rambo: That's right. And so, that was certainly a puzzle.
Carothers: No puzzle. The lower one was below the water
table. The coupling is higher there.
Rambo: But above the water you had all this porous material,
for quite a ways. The shock was running through much more porous
material from the more deeply emplaced lower yield shot than the
shock was from the upper yield shot. The perception at that time
was that this was something to wonder about.
It turns out, from what we saw in the calculations, that being

below the water table tended to give what I call a focusing effect that
changed the attenuation rate of the signal, even though you're going
through the same porous material. The shock is being absorbed
right above the water table; there is quite a lot of attenuation at that
point. But there is another effect. The shape of the wave shows
where it comes from, or where it looks like it comes from, and that
is important. If it becomes more planer, it's going to attenuate less
than the spherical wave you get if everything is a uniform medium.
I didn't know this until we did the Tybo shot. That was an event
that had very high ground motion. It was about nine point eight
meters per second.
Carothers: That is the highest ground motion we have ever
seen on a contained shot in Nevada, if I remember correctly.
Rambo: That's right. Tybo was certainly a mystery because of
the high ground motion. There was at one time some TV footage
of what it looked like from the side, when it went off. It showed this
huge mound rising up, and you could see the curvature quite clearly.
The containment scientist related to me that it looked like it was
going to come out of the ground. It just looked like a cratering shot,
and gave you that impression, it was so rounded.
So, there was a lot of interest in why this could have occurred.
I went back and I ran fifty or more 1-D calculations, and I couldn't
get anything close to what happened, no matter what I did. Even
if I ran it saturated to the surface, I couldn't get anything like that.
And, it just was not in the realm of material properties, and I tried
a lot of them. Even increasing the yield to the maximum credible
yield, and going to extreme material properties I could not get a
match to that kind of a signal.
Carothers: That merely illustrates the deficiencies of your
code.
Rambo: You're right, and the deficiency I found out about was
that a 1-D calculation didn't take into account a flat water table
effect in the soil.
Carothers: Of course not, because in a 1-D calculation the
device sits in a sphere of saturated material. So, the shock goes out
spherically, and it doesn't care what the interfaces are, except a
little energy may get reflected back, and it stays spherical.
Rambo: You did a better job than I could do to describe it.

To look at the surface signals on Tybo we had surface arrays
that went off in a couple of different directions. Without those
arrays I doubt if we would have been able to unravel it. Looking at
that data, you could see that the plastic part of the wave was
traveling in different pathways than the elastic part which was just
going straight through the formation on constant rays. From that
I got the idea that a 2-D calculation would probably show the effect,
So I switched over to a 2-D calculation, and I definitely saw the
effect; there was at least a factor of two between a 1 -D and 2-D
calculation.
It's a Snell's law kind of an effect. What happens is that there
is a change in the shape of the outgoing wave when it hits this porous
surface. It becomes very broad and very shallow, so it looks like the
source is much deeper. That means it's going to attenuate less
because it's progressing now more like a plane wave rather than like
a highly spherically divergent one. It's still spherical, of course, but
it's not as divergent as it was, because the radius is now much bigger.
The calculations showed this enhancement, so you get a much
higher free surface velocity then you would with normal spherical
kinds of geometries.
1 think that was the first time we had discovered that this huge
variety of ground motions could indeed be due to a focused effect
from the layering. In the case of Tybo it happened to be the water
table, but there could be certainly other cases where you'd see
things of that nature. When you go from something that is saturated
to something that's highly porous, and maybe there's some strength
in that rock as well, the the signal is not attenuated very much in the
porous material, and so you may get a focusing effect.
Carothers: This effect occurs when you're going from a
medium with a relatively high sonic velocity into something where
it's slower? Or into a medium with a higher index of refraction, if
you like.
Rambo: That's exactly the right analogy. It tends to be most
pronounced when the interface is between about twenty to forty
meters per kt to the one-third than at other distances. At very high
stresses the shock wave in the saturated and unsaturated materials
give about the same velocity, because they're so high up on the
stress curve, or up on the compressibility curve, that the velocities
look very similar and you don't get the big velocity differences,
usually. If the interface is much farther out, then the distance in
which the shock wave has to change its attenuation is much less, and
so you don't see quite the effect. But around the twenty to forty
meters per kt to the one-third you can really see a pretty good effect
from that, on the ground motion. At least that's what the
calculations tend to show.
229
9
Cavities and How They Grow
When a nuclear device is detonated it deposits a very large

amount of energy into a rather small volume. That deposition of
energy produces a volume of extremely hot, extremely high pres-
sure gases from the surrounding materials. These generate a very
strong shock, which begins to move outward from the shot point.
That shock is strong enough that as it moves out it vaporizes some
rock, melts more rock, plasticallly deforms still more, and finally
weakens to a place where only elastic movements of the rock take
place.
What is left behind after the passage of the shock is a more or
less spherical cavity that contains the radioactive debris from the
explosion, and vaporized and melted materials that contain some
fraction of the energy released. Fundamental to the understanding
of how the containment of nuclear explosions occurs is knowledge
about the formation, the growth, and the eventualy decay of the
temperature and pressure of the post-shot cavity.
As with so many other things in the field of containment, direct
information and data about cavity formation and the conditions in
it are extremely difficult to come by. Much of what is believed is
derived from measurements at a distance where the instruments can
survive the shock passage, from observations on post-shot reentries
made through existing or newly mined passages, and from calcula-
tions which try to match the data and observations there are and
which then hopefully give insight into other phenomena not directly
observable.
Cavity Growth
The formation of the underground cavity is an impressive

phenomenon to consider. In a tenth of a second or so the rock around
the point of detonation of a one kiloton device is moved and altered
sufficiently to create a roughly spherical void that is of the order of
a hundred feet in diameter. For the Cannikin event, which had a
yield of a few megatons, the formation of the cavity took somewhat
longer, perhaps as much as most of a second, but at the end of that

time some 20,000,000 tons of rock had been displaced to make a
cavity in which the Empire State Building could stand. The relative
importance of the various mechanisms that cause the cavity growth
and formation is still debatable, although the general outline of what
occurs is gennerally agreed upon.
Patch: 1 think the shock and the gases are not equally important
in the growth of the cavity, but I think it's a matter of the timing.
In some sense, initially the cavity is driven by the gas pressure inside.
That's what launches the shock. But if you look at the calculated
pressures inside the cavity, because of the r-cubed effect, the cavity
doesn't have to expand very much before the volume goes up
tremendously, and the pressure is forced to drop. And so a great
deal of the motion of the cavity is really a coasting, momentum
driven motion. The fact that the cavity pressures end up at
overburden, give or take factors of two, is somewhat fortuitous,
because we've done calculations for other, partially decoupled
situations, where you don't get anything like overburden pressure
in the cavity, depending on how it's decoupled. It just turns out,
for the strengths in the rocks we have, and the way things work out,
that's kind of where you end up.
An example of where a cavity does not end up at the overbur-
den pressure is an explosion in water, where you can get a
tremendous overexpansion, and effectively a very low pressure
inside the cavity. It isn't smart enough to realize that the overbur-
den pressure around it is such that it ought to stop, and it keeps on
going until it gets to some very low pressure inside, depending on
the depth and the yield, and so on. Of course, it then gets smaller,
since the outside pressure is higher than that inside. Actually, such
a bubble, or cavity oscillates in size, predictably. So, 1 think it can
work out either way.
Carothers: In the very early times after the detonation the
pressure of the shock generated must overwhelm any kind of
material properties or strengths of the rock.
Rambo: I think that's usually the case in the megabar type of
regime. I've heard some people now casting doubt on that, so I did
some equational things that relate to the slope of the shock velocity
and particle velocity curves. Material properties make a difference
Cavities and How They Grow 231
overall, but most rocks tend to look pretty much the same in that
high pressure regime. You don't see any big differences; the slopes
of the curves in a granite look very much like the slopes of the ones
for a weak alluvium. So, there's a tendency to say, "Well, they're
all going to be the same." But there are elements, or there are
different things out there, that do look different.
Carothers: What's your view of what drives the cavity to its
final size?
Rambo: My view is, and I take most of it again from
calculations, is that this enormous Shockwave that's generated, with
a very high gas pressure that sits behind it, gives momentum to the
material as the shock is traveling outward. From what I've seen in
the best physics that we know, in terms of calculations, is that the
cavity pressure then starts to decrease rather rapidly.
Carothers: Well, the rock vapor condenses fairly early.
Rambo: It condenses, but that happens at a later time. Even
at very early times, when that rock vapor hasn't even had a chance
to condense yet, the cavity pressures are down below where they
can have a strong effect on pushing the material outward. What's
happening to the ground around the device is that you've imparted
a large momentum to it, and so it wants to go out. Then it begins
to decouple itself from the cavity pressure behind it, and about all
it seems to know is that it has this big momentum, and so it is moving
out. As it continues to move out, it's encountering resistive forces,
and the peak of the Shockwave that's imparting this momentum is
beginning to decay rather rapidly. Pretty soon this momentum is
fighting the restoring forces of the overburden, and the shear
strength of the material, as the cavity wall material trys to get itself
into a wider, thinner volume as it expands. Eventually, the material
reaches the point where, at maximum cavity radius, the restoring
forces which are wanting to push it back are as strong as the final
momentum forces that were pushing it out.
Carothers: Nort, the detonation releases an enormous amount
of energy into a quite small volume, the shock starts going out,
putting a lot of energy into the rock, which then coasts out to some
place determined by how strong the rock is. Is that what you think
happens?
Rimer: That's containment lore. Basically, the rock doesn't

actually coast. I've heard, ever since I came to S-Cubed, the story
that you start the walls of the cavity moving, and it doesn't matter
how you modeled the cavity pressure. "The cavity just goes and
coasts, and keeps going until the rock strength stops it." That's not
so. Cavity pressure is an important driver. What's in the cavity,
whether it's steam, or the rock is dry, or whatever, is an important
driver, and it does control, to some extent, how long the cavity
grows. If 1 were to rate three things of importance to cavity growth,
one is the strength of the rock, two is the cavity equation of state,
or what's in the cavity. Three is gas porosity, but gas porosity is an
order of magnitude less important than strength, for the final cavity
size. That's gas porosity, as distinct from water saturated porosity.
Outside the cavity region the details of the rock volumetric
equation of state, other than gas porosity crush-up, are relatively
unimportant to containment. They're important if you're doing
something like trying to determine the hydrodynamic yield. They're
important there, but if you're interested in containment based on
displacements of the rock, and how much plastic work you do in the
rock to form these residual stresses, they're not that important.
Cavity Size, or Radius

A number which is often referred to in discussing containment
is the cavity radius. When the term "radius" is used, the implication
is that a sphere is being referred to. That is arguably not the right
term or implication, since cavities are only approximately spheri-
cal, but it is imbedded in the literature and the available data. The
quoted radius is generally determined by post-shot drillbacks which
are made to retrieve samples of the once molten rock for analysis by
the radiochemists. The place where the drill first encounters the
radioactive material, if known in space, can be used to determine a
distance from where the device was before detonation. If the
assumption is made that the cavity grows spherically, with the
device as the center, a radius can be defined. Both the assumption
that the cavity is spherical, and that the position of the device is the
center are suspect, and probably wrong.
The predicted cavity radius is used as one of the means of

selecting a appropriate depth of burial. Also, it is generally thought
that for a given yield a larger cavity is better for containment since
that indicates a weaker rock that allows more cavity expansion, and
therefore a lower residual gas pressure in the cavity.
Kunkle: One of the things I have been interested in is cavity
sizes. That is, what data do we have that might be able to determine
the volume, and define the shape of the cavity. Is it really spherical,
or is it perhaps non-spherical? What is its volume, and its actual
location. Does it float upward or downward with respect to the shot
center, and how is the volume of the crater, if one appears on the
surface, connected to the volume of that initial cavity? One of the
reasons I've been interested in these things is that they are some of
the measurable phenomena of the detonation. You can go out and
see a crater in the desert. You can drill back, and find the lower
hemisphere of a cavity. These are some of the few things we can
actually measure about what happens when a shot goes off.
Many of the other things we would like to know, we just know
very poorly. For example, the shape of the rubble column, the
chimney, under the ground is largely unknown. We have in the past
drilled into a few rubble columns in four and five different places to
try to learn something about their shape, but that only tells us about
that one, and they may be very individual for all we know. Such
things we know little about, but we do know some things fairly well,
such as the lower radius of the cavity, which we tag from our rad-
chem drill backs.
Carothers: There are three cavities that we know a fair amount
about. One is Rainier, where they did an extensive post-shot
reentry and drilling program during the moratorium. One is
Gnome, which had a standing, partially collapsed cavity, where they
reentered and could walk around in it. And one is Salmon, which
had a standing cavity, where they could lower a television camera
into the cavity and look at it. The Salmon cavity was spherical. It
had what could properly be called a radius, and a center. Gnome
and Rainier were both flattened on the bottom, with a bigger
dimension at the waist than that inferred in the upward direction.
Of course, there was surely an instant in time when they were rather
spherical.
Kunkle: There must be some era when that was true. It is a

rather fortuitous circumstances that we have in the past often shot
in quite uniform material. These shots have been located mostly in
Area 3, in the Sandpile area, which has a very uniform material. It's
hard to conceive of shooting in a more uniform geologic setting.
Carothers: And yet that's an area where there are discrepan-
cies in what you would normally expect the cavity radius to be.
Some of those cavities are reported as unusually large.
Kunkle: Yes, there's an area in southern Area 3, in the
alluvium, which seems prone to relatively large cavities. But there
seems to be a gradation in the mechanical properties of the alluvium
in Area 3 as you move from the north to the south, which is up along
the drainage toward Yucca Lake. The larger cavity radii may reflect
some change in the material. There seems to be a general
relationship between the scaled size of the cavity and the material
it was shot in. For example, events shot in the alluvium in southern
Area 3 have a K-factor, which is a relative measure of cavity size,
around the low eighties. Shots in Pahute Mesa, in the very hard
lavas, tend to have K-values of 64 or so. And so, we see a range
of cavity sizes reflecting the geologic circumstances of the shots.
Carothers: Do you think it is the strength of the material in
which the device is fired that is responsible for the variation in scaled
cavity sizes?
Kunkle: The strength of the material certainly has an effect.
If you look at average numbers, as you move from the soft, fluffy,
low density alluviums in southern Area 3, with, say, a density of
1.65, to the medium density alluviums in the center of the valley,
which have densities of 1.8 or so, to the higher density alluviums in
the north part of the valley which have densities near 1.9 to 2.0,
and down into the tuff units, which are perceptibly stronger rock,
to the very dense, strong lava units on Pahute Mesa, you see a
progression of cavity sizes from larger to smaller as the units increase
in their presumed strength.
1 say presumed because we don't really measure strength, but
one could imagine that those materials are getting stronger. The
ailuviumsare too weak to core. They crumble apart. The stuff that
we took out of some of the lavas up on Pahute near the Houston shot
are good tombstone material. I describe them as very competent,

very strong, uniform rock. As you move through this progression
of rocks the cavities tend to get smaller.
Carothers: The data are scattered, but there is a definite
trend?
Kunkle: Yes. Much of the scatter is due to measurement
errors. Where actually is the cavity, for example. In the radio-
chemical drill-backs you have to know where in space, or where in
the ground, you actually intercepted the radiation that marks the
edge of the cavity in order to back out the so-called cavity radius.
The first problem you run into is that this usually isn't a smooth
transition from the native rock into the radioactive melt glass. The
transition is usually a meter or two wide, with fractures and little
pockets of activity mixed in. Turbulent mixing comes to mind,
though of course we've never seen that transition layer in that
detail.
It's not a smooth, sharp boundary, so one of the uncertainties
is where to pick the edge of the cavity to be. That's something which
often has a meter, or two meters, of uncertainty. Then there is an
uncertainty as you lower a gyro tool into the ground to try to survey
in where that spot really is. Those errors build up, and you're left
with a sizable error, which increases linearly with the depth of the
shot, as to where you actually find that interface, just from the
surveying. Much of the spread we see in cavity radii, the K-values,
the scaled cavity radii, can be traced directly to our cavity radius
measurement errors.
If we look at the shots in Area 3 tuffs, which are fairly deeply
buried, the average K-value for those is around 7 4 , 76, plus or
minus 8. About two-thirds to a half of that error, somewhere in that
neighborhood, comes from cavity radius measurement errors. And
so, when you get a discrepancy for a shot, you don't know if you
really had a cavity that may have been large in that direction, or if
you just happened to get unlucky with the surveying.
For devices detonated in tunnels it is possible to reenter, and if

there is sufficient interest, mine back to the boundary of the former
cavity and even beyond, into the region where overlying material
has fallen in and filled the former void. Then there can be accurate
surveys, visual observations, and photographic documentation. Even

so, in the few cases where this has been done, determining a cavity
boundary, or volume, has been uncertain.
Patch: A problem we've always had, at least for DNA, has been
really tagging the cavity in such a way that you have confidence that
you know exactly what the cavity boundary is. In the tunnels we
tend to have fairly big perturbations because of stemming columns,
and things of that ilk. So, unfortunately, the cavity size is not known
very well. It's probably better to talk about the volume, and then
small differences are being cubed. In my mind that's a better way
to look at it.
An issue which 1 think is important is the different ways that
cavities collapse. Some of them collapse in a rotational mode.
That's a shear collapse, if you will, where apparently there's a shear
plane that forms behind the molten edge. It's a slope failure, a
rotational slope failure. 1 don't know how far back this shear plane
is, but our experience is that the cavity radii tend to be about ten
percent greater in the horizontal plane than what you determine by
measuring down vertically. Of course, stuff comes down from the
top also, and so the exact size of the cavity is a little bit iffy.
Another thing is that, at least to first order, all of the DNA sites
we've fired in are wet tuff, and they all are close to the same
strength. So, we haven't really been able to say, in terms of cavity
growth, or cavity size, how rock strength affects these things. 1 think
that's an important parameter for us when we look at the closures
for the DNA experiments.
Maybe I can take a slightly different tangent, that speaks in that
general direction from a somewhat different experience base.
We've done a lot of work with Carl Smith and the Sandia folks
regarding the HE shots in G tunnel. Those shots have ranged from
eight pounds up to a ton. The second area which we worked in fairly
intensively was with Alex Morris at SRI, with fairly small shots. I
think the data, when you look at it, for that range of yields is pretty
unequivocal that strength has a very important effect on the cavity
size.
And it's strength in a funny way. That is, we have found, with
reasonably high confidence, that the response of these earth mate-
rials, be they grouts, or be they tuffs, are rate dependent. In
particular, they have an effectively higher strength if there are very
high strain rates. That shows up in this data base which spans quite
a large range in strain rates, from 3/8ths of a gram charge of HE up
to really nuclear size. Over that range we have seen dramatic
differences in the scaled sizes of cavities.
I think those are reasonably well controlled observations,
because we know, reasonably accurately, what the equation of state
for high explosive is, from its initiation all the way out. And we
have, for the SRI case, control of the grout material. There is not
as much control for the material in Carl Smith's work, except to the
extent that it's a homogeneous body of tuff that's relevant to the
DNA nuclear sites because the properties are close to those of the
rocks they shoot in.
I tend to think of the microphotographs of samples that show
this incredible structure, and I tend to think of the movement of the
rock as being a very complicated process of grains trying to break
cementation, and trying to slide over each other, and doing all kinds
of strange things. So, 1 think of the strength of the rock from a more
mechanical point of view. Being a mechanical engineer, I guess I
think more that way.
The role, or influence, of the water in the rocks on the growth
and size of the cavities is another factor that is not that well
understood. Certainly it has an effect. There is general agreement
that it weakens the strength of the rock, in some indeterminate way,
but how much it affects the growth of the cavity is an open question.
Carothers: ]ohn, in calculating cavity sizes, do you think that
the principal influence is the strength of the rock itself? How
important is the amount of water in the rock?
Rambo: Perhaps we're limited in our calculations in terms of
driving pressures from the steam, but I see only a minor difference
in the amount of cavity pressure that's generated with say, ten
percent water as opposed to twenty-four percent water. The
strength of the material makes a big difference. I am much happier
with a large cavity, because then I make the assumption that it was
fired in fairly weak rock, and the Shockwave is attenuated. And
from all these biases that come from my calculational background,
I see a large cavity as more benign than I do something with a small
cavity.
23 8 CAGING THE DRAGON
Kunkle: I've looked at models of cavity growth, and if the

amount of water in the rock had an appreciable effect on the cavity
size you should be able to evaluate the volume percent saturation,
and as the amount of water and the volume of water in a given
volume of rock increases you should see larger cavities. I have not
seen that there is any significant dependence of the K-values, the
scaled cavity sizes, on that parameter.
Carothers: When the cavity reaches it's full growth, the belief
is that the cavity pressure is determined by the strength of the rock
and the overburden pressure.
Rambo: Yes. I think you do have to add the residual stress to
the overburden pressure. But the cavity pressure is at least
overburden pressure. As far as the water goes, after full growth I
don't see a big difference in the cavity pressure, even though I've
put more water in the calculation. I do see some differences in the
calculations, but not large ones. There is a slight dependence, in
some kinds of soils, where if there is a lot of water, the water tends
to lubricate it and make the material weaker. Water can make a
difference there. That's one effect that can certainly take place.
There is a tendency, in a soil-like material, to see that, but it's not
strongly connected to the cavity pressure itself.
But I will put in a caveat - - not every rock does that. There
was some work done by Bob Terhune, in which he went back into
the calculations, and he said, "Look, we see the strength phenom-
enon difference in the cavity radius, and we see it as to when the
residual stress sets up." He decided that it sort of made sense. So,
he looked at different areas. He looked at Area 20, and by and large
it looked like things set up differently there, in the sense that the
cavity radii tend to be smaller than in the valley. In a very hard
rhyolite, like the rock the Molbo event was fired in, where the
drilling rates were low, there was a small cavity radius. Then you
get into something like Baneberry, where they measured a very weak
rock, and there was a fairly good size cavity radius. The calculations
show the same thing. So, I see tendencies in that direction.
There are still some outliers that I can't explain, and that I
don't understand. From time to time you get something that's
enormously large, or enormously small, in the relative size of things.
I've seen that kind of thing. Given that, I think there is a trend
through all of this that does follow the strength idea. But the data
are noisy, very noisy.
Carothers: Nort, more containment lore. The cavity sizes at
the Test Site are all about the same, scaled of course, since all the
rocks at the Test Site have 1 5% to 2 0 % water, plus or minus a bit.
Would you agree with that?
Rimer: I don't believe that for a minute. I know a lot of people
believe that, but I don't believe that for a minute. Most of the cavity
measurements are from drillbacks into the lower half of the cavity.
They always take the radius measurement from some driilback point
to the old shot point. They don't account for cavity buoyancy, and
even elastic calculations will show the cavity moving up. An
inelastic calculation will show that the cavity may move up two,
three, four feet; maybe even several meters for a big shot, depend-
ing on how weak the rock is, just because of the presence of the free
surface. And for the bigger shots there's stronger material below,
so the upper hemisphere of the cavity is going to be quite a bit larger
than the smallest dimensions. Calculations have shown that. Of
course, nobody knows, because the cavities all collapse.
Carothers: There was one that didn't. That was Salmon. The
cavity was reentered, in the sense that they sent down TV cameras,
and there was a nice spherical cavity.
Rimer: You're right, but that was not at the Test Site. It was
at seven hundred eighty meters, in salt, but not salt all the way to
the free surface. A n d , they reentered nine months later. I spent
a lot of time calculating Salmon, and Gnome. It's clear to me that
in the nine months until they reentered Salmon that cavity wall
creeped in about five meters in radius. I matched all the particle
velocity records from that event, and the calculations that matched
them require about a 21 meter radius cavity. They measured 16
or 1 7 meters. I do believe that Salmon creeped in quite a bit. Now,
it was buried very deep; if it's less deep, there will be less creep.
Evidence from salt mines is that the open drifts want to creep back
at you.
Carothers: Another cavity that was reentered was Gnome, also

in salt. It was not as uniform a medium, and not as uniform a cavity
either.
Rimer: The models that work for Salmon work for Gnome.
That was a layered salt, and that may explain the shape.
Higgins: After Rainier, and after we had done other under-
ground shots we found that we always got cavities with a radius of
fifty or so W to the l/3rd feet. We thought, "Ah ha, all rocks are
behaving in the same way. It doesn't make any difference what's in
them."
And then came some information, first by very circuitous
routes, and then directly, that the French shots in granite in North
Africa didn't make cavities with a radius of fifty W to the 1 /3rd feet.
They only made three or four meter cavities, which means a ten or
twelve foot radius cavity for a kiloton. Well, that couldn't be, so
that informations must be wrong. That was the first reaction.
Then we had a symposium at Davis in 1964; I think it was
called the Second Plowshare Symposium. The French sent a very
large delegation of physicists who were quite willing to talk about
some of the physical effects, as long as they thought it was a one-
on-one quid pro quo. They would tell us the cavity radius from
some shot, and then they would expect us to reciprocate. Well, the
circumstances were such we couldn't do that, so they stopped. But
we did get some information before that, and one of the things that
was confirmed was that their cavities were grossly different from
what we had seen on the Hard Hat shot, which we had fired in
granite.
Carothers: How can that be? You had determined that the
rock doesn't really make any difference.
Higgins: That's what we thought. That was the first clue, and
we were not bright enough to tumble to it soon enough. It should
have told us that the conclusion we had come to about the rock
didn't make any difference was true because all of the rocks we were
looking at were mostly water. Even Gnome, which was shot in salt
in ' 6 1 , was four percent water by weight, so when you put the
sodium chloride and the other things into it, that gives a material
which is like twenty mole percent water. So, even the driest thing
we ever done a shot in was about one quarter water.
What was going on was that the French were firing in the
Hoggar massif, which is a block of granite that's like tombstone
granite. It doesn't have many cracks, it doesn't have any pores, so
there's almost no water there. It was less than a half of a percent,

and it probably was less than a tenth of a percent. So, in their case
they really did have a shot in material with no water - - a dry granite.
The United States, and this is an important point, because it
affects the arms control talks, the disarmament talks, the treaty
negotiations, has never fired an event in any material that isn't
dominated by water. The seismic signal, all this business about the
geologic differences between the Nevada Test Site and the Soviet
Siberian platform, or Novya Zemiya, are trivial compared to the fact
that they all have water. Whether it's granite or tuff isn't important;
what is different is the transmission path. The French really did
several shots in something that wasn't wet, and only they have ever
done that.
Carothers: John, have you done work on the Hoggar shots?

They are one body of experience of shooting in a very dry, very
strong rock, and the cavities there were small compared to the ones
we normally see.
Rambo: I've done a little work on that. My understanding is
that the Hoggar granite is a rock that is like one unit that has not
been fractured. Or if it is, the fractures are much farther apart than
they are in the granites we have. When we looked at our granites,
the fractures were on the order of a foot or so apart.
In our local NTS geology, if you take a piece of granite and
measure it in the laboratory, if it's not fractured, you get a pretty
hard rock. And yet, this material, in bulk, is a weak rock, because
of the fractures. A n d , it's certainly not going to be helped any by
the Shockwave that goes through it. The two sites - - the NTS
granite, and the Hoggar granite - - give completely different answers
in terms of the cavity radii. If you shoot in something that's less
fractured, then you really are starting with a stronger rock, and you
get a small cavity radius. Compared to the laboratory data you have
to degrade the strength of the rock by almost a factor of ten,
because of the rock fracture frequency. There has been some work
done in trying to get the strength from the fracture frequency. I did
calculations on one of the French shots, and I came up reasonably
close to the measured cavity radius.
Carothers: Nort, there's a set of granite data, aside from Pile

Driver, which you are probably familiar with, and that's the French
tests.
Rimer: Hoggar. Yes.
Carothers: The difference from Pile Driver, as I understand it,
is that the Hoggar granite is very dry, and has a very low number of
fractures in it.
Rimer: One every three to five feet, compared to one every
foot or so in Pile Driver.
Carothers: The other thing about those shots is, presumably,
that the cavity sizes were quite small for the yields of the devices.
Rimer: 1 know. I spent a lot of time on that. Actually, those
cavities weren't that much smaller. If you assume that rock is
completely dry, you get a cavity radius which is roughly two-thirds
the cavity radius of Pile Driver.
Carothers: But that means their volumes were less than one-
third of the cavities generally seen at the Test Site.
Rimer: That's true, and there were a couple that were smaller.
There are a lot of stories about the in-situ stresses in that mountain,
but I can't confirm them. They're not confirmable.
There is some sort of phase reversal that came out of Hoggar,
in seismic motion. It can be explained by putting in in-situ shear
stresses - - in other words, the vertical stress different from the
horizontal stresses, in that rock. Steve Day, who was S-Cubed for
many years, and I did a lot of work, and a number of calculations,
on that, trying to explain that. We got some good answers, but I'm
not totally convinced, because if you accept the answers on the
cavity size as being because the material is dry, then the pulse widths
would be very much smaller. Therefore the displacements would be
much smaller. The displacements that the French have published
are fairly consistent with the SRI data. They're further out, and
they're a little smaller than Perret's two measurements here, but
they're not as small as you would get from assuming a very dry, very
strong material. Also, the seismic ground motions aren't that much
smaller, if we believe the yields they have given us. So, I'm not
convinced of the answer.
Carothers: Let me greatly oversimplify this. There are the

people who say, "That rock was very strong, and it is the strength
of the rock that really determines how large the cavity can grow."
Then there are the people who say, "That rock was very dry, and
therefore there was no steam, no gas pressure to push the cavity
out."
Rimer: I don't like the cavity pressure argument, because even
if you accept that Pile Driver was fairly wet - - at most there was a
couple of percent of water in there - - the water would be all in the
pores. I'll buy the dry part as increasing the effective strength; I
won't buy it on the cavity pressure. There was just not enough water
in Pile Driver. Hoggar core samples were sent to Livermore at some
time, and the actual intact strength of that granite is very compa-
rable to Pile Driver granite.
Cavity Shape
Presumably the shock wave that is generated by the detonation
starts out as a spherical wave, imparting the same amount of energy
per kilogram to all of the rock around the device. If the world were
homogeneous the rock should move out uniformly and radially,
leaving a spherical cavity. How good is that simple picture? Not
very, it turns out.
Carothers: DNA has done some tunnel reentries of one kind
and another. What can you say about the cavities themselves?
Ristvet: Well, we definitely know they're not spherical. We
find that they seem to be fairly symmetrical in the equatorial radius
when they're in virgin tuff, but they do snout down the grout filled
drifts. The cavities do grow preferentially in the directions of the
LOS drift and the bypass drift, which usually are where we have been
tagging the radius. Whether that's a function of the mismatch
between the strength in the grout and the strength on the tuff, or
the high water content of the grouts so they sort of popcorn back
in, we don't know. Those are the two leading candidates for an
explanation.
We have two events where we probed the bottom of the cavity

in the conventional manner. I think the one we did on Hunters
Trophy confirms very definitely that the downward growth is less
than the equatorial growth. Out the back in the equatorial plane the
radius is closer to what the radius is below.
You would think, based on block motion phenomenology, that
the in-situ stress field would have some sort of effect on cavity
growth and create asymmetries. We don't see it in the data, or it's
in the noise. I think our measurements have shown that gravity
certainly has an influence on the cavity growth, and the calculations
say it should. Where the surface of the ground is does, definitely.
We like to use the equatorial cavity radius because that's the one of
concern to us, and we can actually walk up and physically put our
hands on it. Well, we used to be able to do that until the ESscH of
today. The "Low As Reasonably Achievable" requirement makes
it very difficult to do a reentry these days.
I'm glad we did the reentries we did when we did them. I think,
without a doubt, that the reentries on Misty Rain, and then the
subsequent reentries on the shots that worked well - - Middle Note,
Mission Cyber, Disko Elm, and Misty Echo - - told us more about
how well we were doing at predicting the phenomenology that we
were trying to predict for containment than anything else. The Red
Hot reentry was invaluable; without it I'm not sure we would have
ever done Misty Echo.
Patch: The field folks have done a lot of work to try to look
at the shape of the cavity in the vicinity of the stemming column,
because that's where we potentially get unusual cavity shapes,
because it's not a homogeneous medium. We're trying to put
something in the tunnel there that fools the cavity into thinking it's
still rock. How successful we've been at that is something we're very
interested in.
Carothers: Mr. Patch, DNA has never fired in a homogeneous
medium, and you know that.
Patch: Well, yes, that's true. But when we take the tuff out
of the mountain and put something else in, it's even less homoge-
neous than it was. 1 would say that a lot of our interest in cavity
shapes has been with respect to how they've interacted with the
stemming. 1 think that, by and large, we've found that we tend to
get preferential cavity growth in the direction of the stemming
column. We do perturb things, and we'd like to understand why

that is, and we'd like to know how to perturb them less than we
evidently do.
Carothers: John, presumably the cavity grows in a more or less
spherical fashion. Or, at least it does in the calculations. Do you
think the cavities are spherical?
Rambo: There was a shot called Clymer, which had a large
opening above the device. We had three satellite holes with slifers
in them, and I could track across those satellite holes and see how
far that perturbation went off to the side. It was the first time we
had ever actually looked at the shape of the Shockwave changing
with distance. That became a basis for understanding, or question-
ing, this idea about a spherical Shockwave. It was an actual
measurement to base that question on. It was the only time that had
ever been done; actually showing the shape of the Shockwave.
Carothers: Did those measurements show that the cavity, as it
was growing, was not spherical?
Rambo: Yes, but that means that the energy, if it had gone up
a Iine-of-sight pipe for a certain distance, was actually forming its
own cavity at that point. Now, I've been biased by calculations I've
done in past years where we've shown that things starting in that
kind of configuration tend to get relatively spherical with time. But
in the early stages, those cavities are not spherical.
Carothers: In the case you're describing I would think of it as
looking more like a teardrop.
Rambo: A teardrop, or a bottle shape. Usually these shapes
are fairly weak in terms of what stress waves start out from some
opening away from the device, and the main body of the stress down
below tends to overwhelm them at later times.
Carothers: Bob Brownlee used to be in the business of what
LASL called hydro-yield. On Bilby, which was a shot of about 2 5 0
kilotons in Yucca Flat, he had three instrument holes. The working
point was fairly close to the Paleozoics. He has said that he could
see from the signals in those three holes that the cavity was not
spherical; it had to have been teardrop shaped to match his data.
The shot point was close to the Paleozoics, so it didn't grow down
much, and it tended to grow up more. That kind of a model gave
a reasonable fit to his data, but a spherical cavity didn't.
Rambo: I would probably interpret it differently. You do
occasionally run into weaker rock, in the tuffs, that tends to move
a little bit faster, but not for terribly long. I would say it had to do
with the material properties, particularly strength, which can make
a big difference to the growth of the cavity. If there is strong rock
below, and weaker rocks above, it can grow more in the upward
direction.
I believe the material properties could make a big difference,
but I don't hold to the idea that the cavity is going to, by its
pressure, cause this change in how the growth is going to occur.
Some people think the cavity is being driven by cavity pressure at
late times, and I don't subscribe to that. I think it's really the
strength and material properties of the rocks that can cause a funny
shaped cavity. Those same properties can also affect the arrival
times of the shock. Some properties may cause early arrivals in the
Shockwaves, but yet may retard cavity growth. But I certainly can
believe a teardrop sort of cavity for a shot near the Paleozoics.
Cavity Pressure
Something which affects leakage through the stemming and
the cables, and the possibility of hydrofracturing through the native
material is the the cavity pressure, and its variation with time. One
body of work, where pressures were measured on high explosive
experiments in the tuffs of G tunnel was done by Carl Smith. For
nuclear events, Billy Hudson developed a method of measuring the
pressure in the fully formed cavity.
Smith: An important thing we could do on the high explosive
experiments, which is much more difficult and expensive to do on
a nuclear experiment, was to mine back to find out what went wrong
with some measurement. We dug back in, recovered all the gauges,
saw how good our grout jobs were, and we learned from all those
things. For instance, there was a shot where we were trying to
measure the cavity pressure. The pressure came down, and settled
at about seven thousand psi. We thought that was a wonderful
measurement, but when we mined back in we found that the pipe
was plugged. So, we knew the cavity came down to seven thousand
psi, and leaked down from there, but the ground shock had jammed
the pipe closed, and so we didn't see that.
That was confirmed on subsequent shots of that size where we
measured significantly lower cavity pressures. A tamped eight
pound shot will generate about eight thousand psi of pressure. As
you go to larger and larger sizes of HE the pressures drop signifi-
cantly. A sixty-four pound shot will develop about forty-six
hundred psi. Thousand pound shots only developed about twenty-
five hundred psi. We believe that's a rate effect in how the material
responds, and how rapidly it responds.
Carothers: And when you go to kilotons?
Smith: You generate just over in-situ pressure.
Carothers: Billy, you have measured pressures in some of the
nuclear cavities, have you not?
Hudson: I would claim that our experiments were the first to
measure cavity pressure on nuclear shots through any significant
fraction of the entire history. In the fairly distant past people tried
to measure cavity pressure in conjunction with some other measure-
ment, or some other experiment. As a result it was sort of a catch-
as-catch-can measurement. In particular, they tried to measure gas
in tubes that were designed to withdraw samples from the cavity.
Usually those measurments involved flow from the cavity into the
tube they were trying to make the measurement in. Usually that
tube plugged. In fact, almost all you had to do was call the system
a gas sampling system to be sure nothing came out.
There's more than one problem with that approach. You have
a real problem if the tube plugs. Even if it doesn't, if you try to
measure the gas pressure at the end of a long tube you have a
problem because you're never in thermodynamic equilibrium. If
you have a hot gas, maybe with water vapor in it, flowing in one end
of a long tube, it condenses and cools, and by the time it gets to the
other end the pressure is quite different from what it was at the
opening.
We reasoned that the best way to make a pressure measure-
ment would be to always have a very small amount of flow toward
the cavity. If you measure the pressure at the source of flow, near
your instrumentation package, and the flow is quite small, you could
argue that the flow at the instrumentation package is essentially the

same as the flow at the end by the cavity, and the pressures are
essentially the same. The tube shouldn't plug if the flow is always
toward the cavity, and maybe you could get a pressure measurement
that way.
And so, that's what we did. We filled the tube with fluid so we
wouldn't have the thermodynamic equilibrium problem you have
with a gas. In the first experiments we actually blew the fluid out
of the tube, with high pressure, so we knew we had established a flow
and we would hopefully stop the cavity growth process from
plugging the tube. That worked very well, in that we got some data
that at least looked as we expected it to look. We might not have
been in direct communication with the cavity, but we were probably
fairly close.
We tried the same experiment several times after that. I think
we've done it successfully five or six times now. We've varied things
a fair amount. For example, we've stopped blowing the fluid out
with high pressure gas. That doesn't seem to be necessary, and it
slows the response time. Not doing that also makes the experiment
a lot less expensive. It costs a lot of money to have high pressure
gas systems around, because they can explode and hurt people. If
it's a high pressure liquid system, there's not much energy involved,
and it's not nearly as much of a safety problem.
The first time we tried was on a DNA shot, and for a reason we
don't understand, it didn't work. Probably it was fault motion
severing the lines, or something. The first successful one was on a
Livermore shot, and after that the DNA people were very anxious
to have us try it on another of their shots. Fortunately, that one
worked very well. Since then we have had another DNA experiment
which looked successful, and three or four Livermore events where
the data looked very good.
We've made enough measurements, and we have enough data
now that we really think that system works to get cavity pressure.
But if that's true, we still don't know why the history from one event
to the next seems to vary so widely. So there are still a lot of
questions to be answered with regard to cavity pressure.
Carothers: You describe the data as varying widely from shot
to shot. What does the pressure history look like? There is the
containment lore from the fifties and sixties that the cavity expands
until the cavity pressure is about equal to overburden pressure, and

then it gradually decays through various cooling processes. Do you
see anything like that?
Hudson: What we think is happening is that there is a sort of
a plateau pressure, a constant pressure that is established after
cavity growth, which then stays fairly constant for a while, probably
due to ablation, mass addition, and so on. The energy per unit
volume probably stays constant as long as nothing is leaking out.
Carothers: When you say it stays constant for a while, how long
is that? Seconds, minutes, hours?
Hudson: That's one of the things that varies. On some events
it's been minutes. On Cornucopia, on the other hand, it was more
like hours. The period during which the pressure is more or less
constant varies considerably. A n d , the plateau pressure itself varies
considerably. We've seen it both well below and well above what
we thought the overburden pressure was. We don't have a model
yet.
Carothers: Perhaps the reason you don't have a model is
because there is no good model of cavity growth, in the following
sense. Cavities that have been reentered are not spherical. They
are not the shape that you see on viewgraphs where the predicted
cavity has been drawn with a compass. Cavities are lumpy, and some
of them are sort of flat, and so on. On Rainier they did a lot of post-
shot reentry work, and there was a very lumpy looking cavity. And
so was the Gnome cavity. Maybe you don't know what the cavity
volume and shape is on the various shots.
Hudson: That may be the answer. The surface to volume ratio
may be important. And as you suggest, the contour of the surface
may be such that on some events you may have a much greater
surface to volume ratio than on others, and consequently you have
different cooling phenomena. I don't know.
I think the reason it's so interesting, and puzzling at the same
time, is that cavity growth and cavity pressure are the source
function for the gas we're trying to contain. Yet for decades we
basically have ignored this part of the problem, in terms of
modeling. We've made very little progress. We have very little new
information, because we've made only feeble attempts to get new
information concerning cavity growth and cavity pressure.
Carothers: Well, cavities are different, and perhaps that's why

your results are different from shot to shot. How different? Shape,
almost certainly. As you said, surface to volume ratio. And then
there are people who say that as the cavity is growing the material
is moving out radially, and stretching tangentially, the pressure is
high, and during that time many hydrofractures are driven out from
the cavity. They don't extend a long way, a couple of cavity radii
or so at most. But that exposes a large surface of cold rock, and that
cools down the cavity, dropping the pressure. A person coming
from that point of view might say that the rocks in different places
have different fracture susceptibilities, and so, different energy loss
histories. And therefore, different pressure histories.
Hudson: That might very well be.
Cavity Temperature
The temperature of the cavity starts at a very high value, a
million degrees or so, but it drops very rapidly as the cavity
expands. The only real information on the temperature and its time
history is derived from examining the detonation products that are
separated at different times from the main body of the material in
the cavity.
Higgins: At the very high temperatures very near the explosion
the transport of energy is very rapid. In other words, after the shock
has gone by the particle velocities are high enough that there is rapid
communication of temperature and pressure between the center of
the expanding gas and its more outward regions. That goes on for
some fair part of the first part of the cavity growth. So, the
temperature in the cavity gas goes down to some temperature that
is considerably less than the electron volt, or the ten thousand
degrees, that many of the calculators are fond of putting on their
pressure versus time charts.
I feel that's a misleading kind of calculation. All of the
evidence from the cavity radiochemistry - - from the fractionation
of the various radiochemical species in recovered products - - points
to the fact that the temperature in the cavity, by the time the
rebound occurs, which is, let's say, in the time between milliseconds
and seconds, has decreased to the point where it's not much above
the melting point of the rock. It's certainly below the point where
there's any rock vapor left.
That's important, because it fixes the maximum threat. The
dynamic phase is going on as the shock wave passes out and leaves
this hot stuff behind. The rebound comes back, and that happens
within a few hundred milliseconds. Because of the rapid exchange
of energy in the cavity up to that time, things have cooled until it's
pretty much in equilibrium; the energy is distributed throughout
everything that's within that cavity radius. My argument has been
that the initial temperature, for calculations, can't be much differ-
ent than the vaporization temperature of the rock. If it were higher
more rock would vaporize until it did reach the temperature of
vaporization.
Carothers: That seems to be a reasonable argument.
Higgins: But it's hard for people who do one-dimensional
calculations to accept, because the inside zone in their calculations
is always at ten electron volts, which is a hundred thousand degrees,
after the cavity expands. The reason it doesn't stay that way is that
anything that is at ten electron volts is very reactive. It's going to
go out and heat up the next thing that's nine electron volts, or one
electron volt, and that time is short compared to a few hundred
milliseconds.
The difficulty with this whole discussion, from a physics
standpoint, is that energy transport in this region of, say, two-tenths
of an electron volt, or three-tenths of an electron volt, is something
no one wants to deal with. The times, the opacities, the reactions
that are going on as things recombine, and you get ionized states,
and sometimes molecules that are two or three electrons deficient
are all things that are not easily calculable. In fact, they are pretty
much, as a general rule, unknown. So, nobody wants to calculate
it because nobody likes to work on a problem that doesn't have a
nice solution. Scientists don't like non-solutions.
I believe that all of the evidence points to the fact that by two
hundred milliseconds, or even one hundred more likely, the cavity
has cooled to about two thousand degrees Kelvin. As the cavity is
cooling down, the pressure is dropping, and so everything is cool
enough that the cavity gases don't have enough pressure to drive
fractures.
There is one more phase. The wall of the cavity has a huge
temperature gradient in it, and I believe that what happens is that
the water in the rockock volatilizes and pops pieces of the rockback
into the cavity, causing further cooling down. The pop-back is
where the water that is caught in the pores turns to steam and
expands. Water going from water at one cubic centimeter per gram
goes to twenty cubic centimeters per gram if it goes from three
hundred degrees Kelvin to four hundred degrees Kelvin. And that's
considerably below the two thousand degrees that might be only a
few centimeters away. So, I believe that there is a period of
exfoliation that's quite rapid, occurring after the first hundred or so
milliseconds, but before a second.
The pressure doesn't change much, because you're adding
more mass and more molecules. The temperature goes down
because you're taking energy out of the molecules in the cavity and
warming the incoming material until it's in equilibrium. The glass
has fallen to the bottom of the cavity, together with a lot of rubble,
and it's now at about the melting point of the rock, between about
eight hundred and a thousand degrees centigrade. And that is the
cavity we explore when we go back in and drill or mine.
Sometime a lot later, and it is an unstable thing, the roof of the
cavity just falls in. It might even start to fall in when that first pop-
off of the water vapor in the water pores occurs. If the rebound has
been strong enough so there is an arch formed, then it will stay there
for a while, whether an hour or a day, I don't know. If that arch is
not very strong, especially in alluvium, I think the blow-off of the
popcorn might very well start the chimney. If it's real close to the
surface, that's what happens. And that's why we see, in certain
other kinds of special circumstances, where you have reflecting
surfaces nearby, very early collapse, in a few minutes. Those are the
cases where the cavity collapse is initiated by the blow-off of the
water in the cavity walls, and those are really dangerous, because the
pressure is still fairly high.
Where Does All That Material Go?

Carothers: John, when a detonation occurs, a big cavity forms.
What happened to all the material that used to be in the cavity?
Rambo: In our calculations it's displaced outward. We see

positive outward displacement. So, you've taken this volume and
you've distributed it. If the material has porosity in it, which it
usually does, some of the volume is taken up in crushing that out.
Although, when I run a completely saturated calculation I still get
a cavity of about the same size. The calculations tend to show some
positive displacement everywhere. The material has to be either
compressed, or move out. I think the outward motion is mostly
where it goes, instead of in crushing the material. And, the surface
can move up just a little. There are some cases, though, where it
looks as though you're moving out material to make the cavity, and
then the surface is lower too. So, yes, where does all that material
go?
There was a shot we fired, called Carpetbag. From the gauges,
the surface was displaced down, compared to where it was before
the shot. That's always been a mystery. I tried to deal with that,
and I was unable to get the gauges to match the big negative
displacement fairly close to the cavity. I didn't see that in the
calculations. Another thing that happened on Carpetbag is that the
surface kept sinking for many months after the shot. It was quite an
interesting phenomenon. I don't think we've seen anything quite
like that in other areas.
Carpetbag was below the water table, and so the material was
wet. I think the material must have been a matrix which was quite
wet and quite weak, and that just the slightest hit from anything
would have have let that matrix rearrange, and relieve that whole
area.
Carothers: Dan, where do you think all the material that was
in the cavity goes? Cavities are pretty large. Even for a kiloton or
so you could put this building in the cavity.
Patch: Let me say where it doesn't seem to go. One can easily
imagine what you do when you grow the cavity is basically to crush
the rock out to some radius. That seems to be a reasonable picture
for something that's got a lot of air voids in it; dry alluvium, or
something of that sort. But, our experience in wet tuff is that if you
go in and take samples post-shot it's very hard to see that you have
what I will call a completely compacted region, even quite close to
the shot.
Now, we have seen, certainly on some events, where it looks

like you're getting this air void back. Preshot you have a one percent
air void. Post-shot you get these samples out and you measure
them, and they still have one percent air voids. You ask yourself,
"How can this be?" It's a very strange thing to have happen. But
if you look at the details of the crush curve, you'll see that this one
percent air void only takes a little load to crush it out.
Terra Tek has done some beautiful work where they've looked
with this technique of injecting metal into the open pore space, and
then etching the sample and looking at it with a laser. It's very
interesting work, and you can see that what has happened to the
rock is that the stresses have generated lots and lots of very fine
fractures, so when you take the sample out of the ground there's a
tendency for these little fractures to open up a little. It doesn't have
to be much to get the one percent back, although that's a different
kind of air void. So I think the rock actually does take up some of
the cavity volume, but it's darn hard to prove from the data.
I don't think anybody can conclusively say, "Yes, see, this rock
used to be one percent air voids, and now it's smashed." But we do
have suggestions that there is some cavity growth that is accommo-
dated by the crushing of the material. I think what you basically do
is you deform the material around the cavity, and because of the r-
cubed effect it turns out once you get a little ways away from the
cavity you're talking about a very small amount of deformation over
an enormous amount of material. The cavity has a lot of volume,
but how much more volume do you have when you go out three or
four cavity radii.
Following the Rainier event there were extensive reentry
observations made. From observations made in early 1961 Ross
Wadman and Bill Richards (UCRL 6586, July 1961, Postshot
Geologic Studies of Excavations Below Rainier Ground Zero) made
this comment: "Block movement rather than rock compression
accounts for the rock displaced from the cavity. The rock moved
radially away from ground zero along shock produced shears that,
in many cases, were strongly influenced by preshot zones of
weakness. The Iithologic rock units, below the cavity have been
thinned and depressed but not appreciably distorted or mixed.
Rock Melt and Non-Condensable Gases

Carothers: A kiloton of rock melted per kiloton of yield is a
number often mentioned, but there are other numbers used some-
times. How much rock does get melted, and how do we know that?
Higgins: Well, the question of how much rock gets melted is
an awfully good one, and the how do we know is an also good
question. The methodology was, and is, to take a piece of rock that
was melted by the detonation, do chemistry on it, and determine
what fraction of some chemical species that is unique to the
explosion is found in that piece of rock. Then you presume that
fraction represents the fraction of the total melted rock, of which
you have a little piece.
Carothers: So, if I have a piece of the solidified melt that
weighs ten pounds, and I find a millionth of some device-produced
isotope in there I say, "There must have been a million times ten
pounds of melted rock."
Higgins: Right.
Carothers: Isn't that rather presumptuous of you chemists, to
make such a large extrapolation?
Higgins: Well, yes, it is rather presumptuous, but after doing
literally hundreds of samples we have found that the answer each
one of those hundreds of samples gives is essentially the same. But
not always, which is why I said that it is a very good question. It is
still an open question. However, there was a time when everyone
thought they knew that answer precisely.
Carothers: To know something precisely is to calculate it. An
experimentalist never knows anything precisely.
Higgins: It's almost that bad. From the earliest samples there
were definitions people tried to follow. There were several kinds of
melted rock recovered, and one of them was called "puddle glass."
Puddle glass was defined as being a non-vesicular, black, shiny,
glassy material.
From the first few hundred samples it was found that the
numbers one obtained for puddle glass per kiloton were remarkably
consistent, and constant at about eight hundred tons of puddle glass

per kiloton of fission. Or, if you wanted to be more approximate,
a kiloton for a kiloton of yield.
The other kinds of glass that were found, which were called
variously chimney glass or frothy samples, gave numbers which were
more scattered. In the range that I've seen they were from about
two hundred tons per kiloton as the very smallest number, up to as
much as three thousand tons per kiloton. And I would guess that
even larger numbers could be measured if you took a chunk of rock
that you could not visually identify as glassy melt, and analyzed it
by that same technique.
Carothers: When you talk about determining the amount of
melt by taking a very small sample, determining what you believe to
be a fraction of some isotope that was produced, and then multiply-
ing that small sample mass by the supposed total amount of that
isotope, you're doing the same kind of thing you do with cloud
sampling on atmospheric shots. You're making the assumption that
things have been homogeneously mixed, and that you've got a
representative sample.
Higgins: That's right. And the only proof of whether that is
true or not true is from internal tests. One such internal test is to
look for a fraction of the fissile material, for example, as compared
to the fraction of an external tracer, and look at the variability of
one to the other in the same set of samples. If they're widely
different, then we could guess that none of the isotopes are
representative of the total.
Carothers: The process is similar to what you do in atmo-
spheric cloud sampling, but it must be a harder problem. When you
sample a cloud after an atmospheric detonation, you're only trying
to determine the bomb fraction; you're not trying to determine the
size of the cloud. Here you're trying to determine the size of the
cloud, as it were.
Higgins: Yes. But while the numbers weren't published often,
we also determined the size of the cloud in atmospheric testing.
And, a rather surprising number is that a kiloton of lofted material
per kiloton of yield is valid for an atmospheric burst, as long as the
fireball touches the ground. That was an astounding discovery.
Carothers: You're beginning to sound as though a kiloton per

kiloton is a magical number.
Higgins: Yes, it almost sounds that way.
In the beginning of underground testing we used symmetrically
placed tracers in the ground zero room. We put them at the corners
of a cube, or perhaps an even more ordered symmetry than that.
We put them at points representing the faces and corners of a cubic
array, for example. We found there were exceptions to perfect
mixing for very small yields. But at about one or two kilotons and
above, it really didn't make any difference if we put in six tracers,
or one, or four. We got essentially uniform mixing.
The implication of all that is, there is a mixing of vaporized
material in the early cavity, while it's growing. The particle
velocities are very high, and the particles in the growing cavity make
many, many transits across the gaseous region before it stabilizes
and starts to condense. If that weren't true, putting a tracer on two
sides of the device would give different results in the two directions
in the final cavity, and that was never seen on larger yields. On very
small yields we did find pronounced asymmetries.
During the 1 960's we did experiments where we had open
holes below the device, to try to separate the radioactive debris
from the center of energy. We even built rather unsophisticated
reflectors, and those were successful to a degree. But if you think
about it a little bit, if you deflect all these very hot fission products,
they are hot enough to interact with their surroundings and cause
new gas to be formed, which then mixes back in the direction the
fission products came from.
In one experiment we put several hundred grams of U233 in
the bottom of a hole which was open to about two hundred feet
below the device. In the glassy material that was recovered we
looked for just the presence of U233. What we found was as large
a fraction of the U233, which was two hundred feet from the
device, as of the device material itself. So, the 233 bounced out
of the bottom of the hole, back up the hole, and mixed with all the
gaseous material pretty uniformly. While we got a big fraction of
the total radioactivity directed down the hole, what was in the
bottom of the hole mixed very well with those things that were
where the device went off.
What was implicit in the results of those experiments was that

the glass was a consequence of a multistage set of vaporizations.
That is, the initial device energy vaporized material, and the shock
wave generated from that vaporized material continued to form
more vapor outside of that region. So, simply directing the first
vapor down the hole didn't do anything at all about the material that
was being generated by the expanding shock wave. Very crudely,
what those experiments showed was that the vapor first formed was
about seventy or eighty tons per kiloton, and that the additional
melting and vaporization made up the other eight hundred or nine
hundred that we observed from the total sample later on. The
surprise, I think, was that such a small fraction of what was finally
melted and vaporized was produced by the device itself. It was
about one tenth, or a little less.
Carothers: The cavity is growing, and there's some vapor in
there; pretty dense, but vaporized material. You are saying that to
the particles it is a thin vapor; the mean free paths are long. It's
diffuse enough that the particles can move freely through it.
Higgins: The conclusion is correct, but to think of it as being
very thin is probably not correct. A better way to think of it is as
an extremely hot region where the particle velocities initially are
very high - - like eighty centimeters per microsecond.
Carothers: And everything is highly ionized. Since the atomic
scattering cross sections are large compared to nuclear scattering,
if you strip the atoms of most of their electrons the mean free paths
becomes quite long.
Higgins: That's precisely correct. You have particle velocities
approaching many tens of centimeters per microsecond. The vapor
density, including atoms and electrons, is grams per cubic centime-
ter, or some significant fraction of that, but with such high velocities
the transit time for any sensible number of meters is not long. The
expansion time of the cavity, whether it's from a kiloton or a
hundred kilotons, is in the order of a fraction of a second up to, for
the very largest yields, a second. So, when the particles are going
many centimeters per microsecond you have time for a lot of
transits across the cavity, and bouncing around, and scattering, and
normalizations of the various regions with each other.
Carothers: If you keep getting consistent numbers from the

puddle glass, that also would imply that it doesn't matter much what
the original material was; tuff, or alluvium, or basalt, or whatever.
Higgins: Yes. That was the early conclusion, and the early
experiments verified that, in a way. Our first experiments in
granite, which were Hard Hat and Pile Driver, produced slightly less
melt, but not so much so that one would say it was a different
mechanism. I believe, in retrospect, and now that we've looked at
material from a lot more sites in the tuff and alluvium, that those
were spuriously obtained results. It really isn't true in general that
the same amount of rock is melted per kiloton at different sites.
That was an accident of the composition of the materials. Ted
Butkovitch and several other people have more carefully measured
some of these same numbers. They add the so-called puddle glass
to all of the other glass and ask "How much was heated above some
temperature?" The usual temperature they use is a thousand
degrees centigrade. And they find that number varies with porosity
and water content.
Carothers: The more water, with its high specific heat, the less
melt?
Higgins: No, it goes the other way. The more water, the more
molten material there is. The reason that's true is that water and
almost any silicate rock or compound form eutectics that have
melting points that are sharply less than the melting points of the
pure rock.
In our initial work we'd always go to the laboratory and
carefully dry the samples. Then we would measure all of the things
like melting points, and vaporization temperatures, and so on. That
turns out to be a gross mistake. We discovered the hard way that
when you're dealing with the earth's materials, water is an intrinsic
part of the system. To remove it distorts all of the results from that
point forward.
There were things that people had worked on for a long time
that were changed and amplified by the work at the Test Site. I
don't mean that we've been that remarkable in our science in
underground testing, but it really wasn't until we began to look at
the molten rock formed by nuclear explosions that volcanologists
examined their numbers to determine what temperatures existed in
the earth to form lava. Prior to the underground tests the
volcanologists did the same thing we did. They dried out their lava
samples, and said, "This lava came out of the ground at fifteen
hundred centigrade." Then, when they went and looked at the
volcano, what was coming out of the ground was coming out at nine
hundred degrees centigrade. And they found some lavas, in western
Colorado, that indicated six hundred degrees centigrade. How in
the world did those volcanos produce that molten rock at six
hundred degrees when everybody knows volcanos start out at
Fifteen hundred?
So, there were elaborate theories about secondary melting
producing two or three times more lava than the primary vent
produced, and that meant you really had to reduce the measured
volcanic flows two, or three, or four-fold, because what you saw
really wasn't the amount that came out of the volcano itself. The
theory was that what was produced was really a lot less than what
you saw, but it was so hot that it melted a lot of other rock. There
were a lot of things like that floating around in the literature.
Now, the tuff at the Test Site came out of a volcano. And when
it came out, it came out as a solid, even though a pretty hot solid.
Some of it came out as a liquid, but not very much. But water
condensed into this hot solid almost immediately, and then it melts
at around eight hundred or nine hundred degrees centigrade. If you
take the water out of it, it melts at fifteen hundred or so. We were
extremely puzzled by that until we began to do some experiments
at modest pressures, keeping some of the water in it. And lo and
behold, the more water that was in it, the lower the melting point.
And, of course, the lower the melting point the less energy it takes
to heat it to melting.
The point is that the amount of melt is very much dependent
on the amount of water that is present - - the more water there is,
the more melt, and the less water, the less melt. So, when we said
there was the same amount of melt from granite and tuff, we were
looking at only that portion of the tuff melt that made puddle glass,
and comparing it with the total melt from granite, where all of the
melt was essentially puddle glass. They turned out to be very close
to the same amount, but that was a fortuitous accident. The total
melt from a a detonation in tuff, we now know, varies with water
content, and it goes from a low of about a thousand tons per kiloton
up to about three thousand. Somewhere in that factor of three, all
of the experiments that we've looked at fall.
'"I/''
!'•"- Cavities and How They Grow 261
. *; Carothers: How could it get to be as big as three thousand tons

-]4; per kiloton?
;
'v Higgins: By the inclusion of all of the secondary melted rock.
:;• And there's another thing to remember; the rock vapor that's
initially produced is much hotter than the vaporization point of the
X rock. Much hotter. So, a little of that rock vapor can go onto a cold
'•'•> rock and vaporize it too, and still the total is maybe right at the
vaporization point. The heat capacity per unit mass of rock vapor
;!u is not very different than the heat capacity of the solid rock itself.
> Slightly less, but very slightly less. So, if you have a gram of rock
V vapor that's three thousand degrees above the vaporization point,
it can very happily vaporize two more grams of rock, and you'll end
•':' up with three grams at the vaporization point. That mechanism
probably accounts for a lot of the molten material we see post-shot;
the secondary vaporization and melting.
Carothers: The material you find in fractures?
'5 Higgins: Yes, or even in the puddle glass. The way we get the
'•';.'. occasional sample of the initial rock that's vaporized by the shot is
-,'' from the material that's frozen out in fractures. When it goes into
•.;' j a fracture it is essentially frozen instantly. Something that gives us
•'; information about this comes from the tunnel Iine-of-sight shots.
St When the pipe closure fails drastically, a little tiny fraction, a solid
;;.,;: angle's worth if you like, ofthat initial vapor gets directed out a very
.;! long distance. We've occasionally, unfortunately, seen that hap-
'>;;« pen. It cools off, and it has so little total energy that it can't cause
:' any more melt. When you work back, it always turns out to be
i'}•; between seventy, eighty, or ninety tons per kiloton. That does kind
of prove these speculations that are done from calculations, and
thermodynamics, and some other arguments are correct.
Carothers: When you say seventy, or eighty, or ninety tons per
^ kiloton, you mean that's the initial amount of vapor that's produced
directly from the device itself?
Higgins: Right. That's the initial rock vapor. Of course, the
-, device doesn't really make much contribution to that mass. In the
*;, early days we used to say that we could approximate the device by
putting a ton of iron where the device was, and that was a good
approximation. If you mix in all of the construction materials and
the canister in with the device, that's about a ton. And if you mix
the molecular weights, starting with ninety-two for uranium and one
for hydrogen, iron is about right. It's sort of the geometric mean
of everything that's around.
Carothers: We have talked about the amount of rock that is
melted per kiloton. When that is melted, how much carbon dioxide
is produced?
Higgins: Well, that is part, but just part, of the problem of non-
condensable gases produced by the explosion. Carbon dioxide is
sort of the generic name for the non-condensable gases produced.
It's clear there are quite a few of them, and the reason they are
important is that when we say that we can contain the explosion, we
really mean that we can contain the gases that carry all the various
radioactive materials.
First, there are the vaporized rock gases. They condenses
really rapidly because they go from vapor to liquid at three thousand
centigrade or so, and there's a lot of cold rock around, so those
vapors don't go very far. The next least condensable thing is water,
and steam can go a little bit further than the rock vapors. When,
on the rare occasion the steam gets out it's pretty catastrophic, and
it's very spectacular. Those events are very distressing to the
containment people. There are tons and tons and tons of steam
present in the cavity prior to its condensation to water. If it finds
a path out it can carry large numbers of curies, usually on the order
of a hundred thousand curies of radioactive material per kiloton, out
with it.
That is sort of the last violent level of non-condensable gases.
Below that, on a scale of colder and colder condensation, there are
carbon dioxide, and methane, and hydrogen, and other permanent
gases at room temperature, that are produced by the thermal
decomposition of things that surround the explosion. On some of
the early tests we observed that the test would be contained,
including the rock vapor and the steam, but that on surface collapse,
or on a time scale of a few tens of minutes, or hours, following
detonation there would be clouds of radioactive gas rolling around
the region of the shot. They were invisible, but they carried what
turned out to be a large numbers of curies of radioactive gases.
Now, fortunately, in all the cases that were documented, those

gases were noble gases, and they are biologically inert. There was
great concern at the time that they might contain radioactive iodine,
but in spite of intensive efforts no great amount of iodine was ever
found in those gases.
Carothers: You'd think there could be. There's the iodine-
xenon link.
Higgins: Yes, and there's lots of xenon, but almost no iodine.
It's a fortunate fact of the decay sequences that it happens that way.
When we examine those unfortunate experiments, and look for
reasons for that radioactive gas, there was first the association of
certain areas of the Test Site with that phenomenon. The next step
was, what is different about those areas of the Test Site? It was
found, number one, that the bad experiments always occurred in the
alluvium, and not in the tuff. Number two, they always, almost,
occurred in regions where the alluvial material contained large
amounts of Paleozoic carbonate gravel. And the worst ones were
from Area 5, which means the Frenchman Flatside of the pass when
you go out to the CP. There were others, from the far north end
of Yucca Valley; Area 2, Area 10, and to a lesser degree, Area 8.
In examining those, the presence of carbonate rocks was observed.
The carbonate decomposes at high temperatures, and pro-
duces carbon dioxide, which then displaces the gas that's in the
pores in the rock, as in a sponge, and pushes that out of the way.
As soon as it pushes all of the gas out of the way all the way to the
surface, seepage will occur. If there's enough air-filled porosity
between the detonation point and the surface, it will push out until
it's expanded to atmospheric pressure, and then it'll just stop.
Carothers: Presumably there is some association between how
much carbonate rock is present, how much of that rock is melted,
and how much carbon dioxide will be formed. Does anybody know
that, or do they just estimate it?
Higgins: I'd say that at the present time it's an educated
estimate. What has been measured is the temperature at which the
carbon dioxide is given off, and that is somewhat less than the
melting point of the rock. It's like six hundred and fifty, or seven
hundred degrees centigrade.
Carothers: Then I would be right in saying, "Well, if there are

eight hundred and seventy tons of melt per kiloton, all the carbonate
in those eight hundred and seventy tons is going to be decom-
posed."
Higgins: Yes. A nitpicker would say it should be a little larger
than that, but not very much. The question is, where is the
carbonate rock? If you move the working point into a layer that
doesn't have any carbonate, you would say there wouldn't be any
carbon dioxide generated. That isn't quite consistent with the
observations. The reason is that when collapse occurs, if there's
carbonate right above the cavity that can fall into the hot cavity,
some of that can get decomposed. But, it would be much smaller
than if the working point were in that carbonate region. So, those
little qualifications notwithstanding, it's the general assumption that
the amount melted is the amount interacting to form carbonate.
The other kind of non-condensable gas is that formed chemi-
cally by the reaction of metals with water to release hydrogen. It
could be the iron or aluminum in the canister, or a lot of other
things. One of the more exotic is boron carbide, which can interact
with water; one boron carbide can make seven hydrogen molecules.
But the chemistry is the same. It has to be in the melt region to be
hot enough, and be mixed with water, which is steam under those
circumstances. Of course, there's plenty of water around. If you
want to approximate the world you take silicon dioxide, plus water
on an equal molar basis, and that's pretty good. You're only making
second and third order corrections to put in the calcium, and the
aluminum, and the carbon, and all the other stuff.
Carothers: Funny, Gary, that with all that silicon around we
ended up carbon-based.
Higgins: Isn't it? There is one little fact of nature, however,
that says silicon was important. That is that the sense and
orientation of the DNA molecule is identical to that of the silica in
a glass structure — I learned this fact from Bill Libby. And I maintain
that DNA got its pattern by being on a clay particle, and that the
first live reproducible virii came from clay. That is, they were
organic molecules that got the pattern, and replicated off a piece of
clay.
265
10
Cavity Collapse, Chimneys and Craters
There are many observable things that occur after a detonation

takes place, and the cavity has reached its full growth. At some time
the roof of the cavity gives way, and the overlying rock falls into the
cavity volume. This fall of material sometimes causes the surface
to slump and form what is called a crater, although purists call the
subsidence that occurs a "sink." A crater is something that is
formed when material is ejected from an area, and there are a few
true craters on the Test Site, the Sedan crater being the most
impressive example. Here sinks and craters will all be called
craters, bowing to the overwhelming majority who use that nomen-
clature.
How and why and when cavities collapse, what the conditions
are in the column of displaced material that often, but not always
reaches the surface, and the reasons for the shape and sizes of the
surface craters is largely unknown. There are some correlations that
can be inferred.
Keller: It was in using the data bank I had put together that 1
discovered the correlation between crater dimensions and yield,
and some other things like that. One thing I noticed was that the
line-of-sight pipe events always collapsed much faster than the
others. And I also discovered that there was a good correlation, if
you presume bulking, between the dimensions of the cavities, as
best we knew them, and the dimensions of the craters, and the yield.
You would intuitively think there had to be some correlation,
except it was popular then, and even now in some peoples minds,
to think that compaction was equally as probable as bulking during
the chimneying process. Since then the subject has been picked up
at Los Alamos by Erik Jones at one time, and Tom Weaver, and Tom
Kunkle, so there have been three more resurrections of that subject.
Each time there was a larger data bank and better statistical
techniques for analyzing it, but nothing new was discovered; it was
only refined. One surprising thing was that there was an amazing
lack of scatter in the fits to the data.
The thing I always liked about the crater dimensions was that
they were the best known features. They used to do very detailed
contour mappings of the craters, and so you could really tell exactly
what the volume was. And there was a pre-shot and post-shot
difference map. Today you don't know that as well because they
don't do that before and after comparison.
It turned out that the depth of the crater, not the volume, was
the most sensitive characteristic of the crater with regard to the
yield. The crater radius was the first order correction to that, and
still the volume wasn't. I'm not sure why that's true. Many people
tried to relate the crater volume to the yield. They got very poor
results, so they were just turned off by the whole concept, and were
rather outspoken about how you couldn't tell anything about the
event from the crater dimensions.
Carothers: Craters come in a lot of different shapes. There are
ones people call post holes, others they call dishes, and there are
various other shapes. How can it be that the depth of the crater,
which seems to be so variable from area to area for equal yields, tell
you anything about the yield?
Keller: Well, let me tell you what the simple relationship was.
The first thing I took was a column straight down the middle of the
chimney. I took the height of that column before collapse to be
from the top of the cavity to the surface, and after collapse to be
from the bottom of the cavity to the bottom of the crater. Any
difference in that dimension before and after collapse was bulking
or compaction of the rocks in the chimney. I expected that there
would be convergence of that because of the slumping you see in
craters, and also because of the collapse of the cavity into the
bottom. And so I expected bulking, and I just plotted that bulking
factor, the ratio of those two columns versus the depth of burial.
There was a lot of scatter, but it was not nearly as much as I had
expected. This bulking factor was very high for low depths of burial
and yields, and it asymptotically approached a value of about
eighteen percent, as I recall, for high yields and very large depths
of burial. That was the first clue that there was reasonable order.
The thing that defeats the argument about there being compac-
tion is that there is a very clean cutoff between events that breach
the surface and those that don't. It's a scaled-depth-of-burial
cutoff, and it's relatively sharp. If you had compaction sometimes,
Cavity Collapse, Chimneys and Craters 267
it wouldn't be that well defined. Basically you're forced to believe

that bulking does occur every time, and that the bulking actually
limits how far the chimney will propagate.
Then I tried the crater volumes and that didn't help. I looked
at the crater radii to see if there was any correlation there. Now,
the depth of the crater will give you a yield but it may be too high
or too low. But there seems to be compensations to the extent that
if the depth is too great for a particular yield the radius of the crater
is too small. And so, there are skinny craters and there are extra
wide craters, but I could correct the yield I determined from the
depth with the yield from the radius, which is not so well behaved.
The craters that form at some long time after the shot, after
there has been a collapse that didn't reach the surface, and the area
is presumably stable, have been a threat to personnel that wasn't
fully appreciated for some time.
Miller: One time we had something that was almost like what
happened up on T-tunnel a few years later, where people got hurt
when it collapsed. We had an event in Area 2, and it used to be they
didn't fence the GZ, and this hole had no fence. We were doing
angle drilling, and we were rigging up the post-shot rig. Part of our
equipment were these big blowers to suck air to the cellars in case
we had a release from the drilling. This teamster drove up to the
location, and he's driving a big rig. He drove all the way to the GZ
almost, turned around to get spotted, and as he's returning the
ground collapsed. The float with those blowers went into the crater.
Fortunately it was not a cookie cutter; it was a saucer shape. Part
of the tractor wheels went into the dirt where it cracked, and the
tractor couldn't move. This guy jumped out with his hard hat and
his lunch pail, and just ran like hell. We took another tractor, or
dozer in there, and grabbed hold and pulled the whole thing out.
Fortunately nobody was hurt. It was close though, very close. That
was the event that caused us to start fencing the ground zero area.
Keller: On the accident on Rainier Mesa with Midas Myth,
when they dropped the trailers and some people in the crater as it
formed, the same order that I had found earlier for crater formation
was relevant to that event. Midas Myth turned out to have one of
the smallest scaled depth of burial for events in Rainier Mesa.
Although they'd existed on other events on the Mesa, craters had

not been seen, or recognized. They were just so shallow that they
were not noticed.
Carothers: Roy, did you ever do any drilling work on Rainier
Mesa?
Miller: Oh yeah. There was a shot in a vertical hole there
called Wineskin, in U 12r, in'69. That had a surface collapse. The
fact is, after the collapse they had where they dropped the trailers
in the crater, they said there had never been one on Rainier Mesa
to collapse to the surface. Ken Oswald took them all up there and
showed them that surface collapse.
Keller: When you plotted those events that had been shot in
Rainier Mesa, and whose chimney heights were known, Midas Myth
fit right on a nice curve. The chimney height was just right on the
line, and the chimney height would be above the surface, which
gives you a crater. At the time, the folks who thought the shots on
Rainier Mesa never cratered were not aware of the surveys that had
been done, and that showed the shots did crater a little bit. And so
it was a matter of not knowing what they didn't know. And one did
not normally put trailers at ground zero. It was an unfortunate
incident. There is a lot more order to this data than some people
are willing to believe, and so within some uncertainty it's a very
useful way to look at some things, such as yield, or crater formation.
One thing that's evolved most recently out of that is that Tom
Kunkle and I looked at large yields, and we found that some of the
crater volumes were larger than that of the cavity inferred from the
measured cavity radii. Of course, if bulking is existent in every shot,
you can't have a crater volume that's larger than the cavity volume.
We looked at that more carefully, and since I believe they all bulk
and there's no reason to believe that the large yields ought to
compact, the cavity inferred from the crater dimensions is a simple
constant times W 1 /3rd, in radius.
The conclusion you have to come to is that the radius measured
in the downward direction is not characteristic of the cavity volume,
and that the cavity volume is larger than that measurement would
suggest. And there are good calculational reasons to believe that.
There are calculations that have been done that show stress gradi-
ents, and the refractions from the surface, tend to allow growth in
the upward direction. And so it's in light of that conviction, unless
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Hutch (left) and Flax subsidence craters. Two closely spaced events.
Equipment near surface ground zero, after the crater has formed.
you're real near the surface and you get a strong relief wave, and you
crater, that cavities really are pretty much a constant times W to the
l/3rd. Now, they are occasionally bigger. They're obviously
bigger, as measured, in the southern area of Yucca. Not only is the
measured cavity radius larger in that area, the craters are also larger,
which supports that correlation.
Carothers: You can look at the crater, and you can do surveys,
and you can get the dimensions as accurately as you care to pay for.
On the other hand, the cavity radius, if there is such a thing, is in
fact poorly known. They drill down, poke into an uncertain spot
where the cavity used to be, and somebody picks a radius based on
some level of radiation there. The impression I get is that no one
believes those reported radii are very accurate. How did you deal
with that when you tried to compare the crater depths before and
after the shot?
Keller: I presumed that there was uncertainty in the radii, and
that the crater volumes were known better than the cavity radii. So,
I went back and calculated yields from the crater dimensions, and
there were a few yields that were way off. One of them was
Bandicoot. Since then they have gone back and re-drilled it, and
found that the measured cavity radius is larger than originally
reported. There's also reason to believe that the actual yield was
substantially higher than the published yield. And so, those kinds
of things show up.
There are a couple of events where it's probably worth noticing
those differences, and one is Merlin. Merlin is the shot from which
the samples were obtained for which all material properties for
alluvium are based these days. "Merlin alluvium" — you hear it all
the time. Well, those properties are deduced from a presumed yield
for Merlin. I've never really pushed it, but I suspect that the Merlin
yield as given isn't correct either.
It was like '67 when I first developed this correlation, and Bob
Brownlee was excited about it, or seemed to be anyway. He took
it to Charles Brown and said, "Hey, here's a way to measure yield."
And there were a couple of folks who said, "That's just because we
always bury shots at the same scaled depth, and you use depth in
there, and that's why you get that." Well, thats's not true. If you
just knew the depth you wouldn't get nearly as good a correlation.
Another thing Brown said was, "We already have Hydyne, we have
rad chem, and we have seismic; what do we need another yield

determination for?" That was his response. Well, it's actually
turned out to be more useful than that, but it was interesting to hear
the logic that would prevail in those circumstances.
Kunkle: The radius we measure from the radiochemical drill

back is developed by taking the point where the bomb went off, and
finding the geometric distance to where the drill hole first found
radiation. There are a fair number of assumptions there. One is that
the effective center of the cavity is the center of of the explosion.
Now, there's no reason to believe that should be true. Another
assumption is that you have a spherical cavity. Based on these
assumptions, you can derive a volume.
Many of our shots, especially those for a successful event, have
a scaled depth of burial of perhaps a hundred twenty, a hundred
twenty-five meters. Those in the valley collapse to the surface, and
make very large, nice surface craters. I've always felt there ought
to be a relationship between the size of that surface crater, the
volume of the surface crater, and the volume of the cavity. And in
fact there is. This leads me to believe that yes, in fact, by and large,
that radius we're getting tells us something about an actual radius
— that the cavity is more or less spherical, and it's more or less
centered on the explosion point.
Carothers: You could make the argument that cavities are
perhaps not spherical for a variety of reasons, but except for a
certain number of special cases, they're spherical enough. These
one or two meter wiggles and protrusions in the cavity wall don't
amount to much. We can average those out. And so, while cavities
aren't spherical as we draw with our compass . . .
Kunkle: They may be as you draw circles freehand, like many
of us draw circles. That has been my impression of how cavity
sections may be. Conversely, I think we've seen cases, and we
expect to see cases, where the cavities are squashed by the geology.
One of the things we seem to see, when shooting over very hard
material, in a softer material, or under a very hard layer in a softer
layer is that the cavity is either pushed down when it's in the softer
material under the hard layer, or squashed on the bottom as it tries
to grow down through the hard material. By and large, the little data
we have from our drill backs tends to support these models. In the
Cavity Collapse. Chimneys and Craters 271
final stages of cavity growth, the material strength must be deter-

mining where that cavity stops. And so, in weaker materials the
cavity should be bigger.
Carothers: What comments would you make about craters
with respect to cavities?
Kunkle: Well, for events that take place at relatively small
scaled depths of burial — a hundred twenty or hundred forty scaled
meters — the crater and the depth of burial together are a very good
indicator of how big the cavity was underground.
I don't think this is surprising. At least, it wasn't to me. One
would envision that the size of the crater ought to be related to the
initial size of the cavity and its depth of burial, given the material
it's in, of course. A n d , indeed, this is in fact the case. There is an
excellent relationship between the yield of the device, it's depth of
burial, and the depth and size of the crater on the surface.
You'd have to improve the rad chem yields for me to do any
better in tuff, which is a very uniform material. That was, to me,
a rather surprising result. I didn't expect to find such a good
regression relationship. Now, in alluvium, it doesn't work as well.
There are evidently different types of alluvium we shoot in. More
or less, the tuffs in the valley seem, to the bomb, to be tuffs. And
of course, geologically there are not large differences between them
either. That gives a good ability to deduce actual event yields from
observable, unclassified aspects, as we have found.
Carothers: Unclassified aspects perhaps, but I have to know a
lot of things. I have to know the relationship exists, and then 1 have
to know that this shot, whose yield I want to know, was fired in the
same material and not something else. I do need to know a number
of things in order to derive that yield.
Kunkle: Yes. The events I've been most interested in are those
involving treaty compliance for a hundred and fifty kiloton limit.
And so, the question is, can I verify a hundred and fifty kilotons
from unclassified information? After all, I know the depth of burial.
I can tell that from the cable lengths, although that could be
disguised. But I could find out the depth of the hole, to find a
maximum depth of burial. I can tell if there's a surface crater - -
that's quite easy to know from a satellite or other overhead
photography.
Does this tell me something about yield, if I happen to know it

was in a tuff unit in the valley? At a hundred fifty kilotons, if I shoot
in the valley, I'm goingtobeina tuff unit, because I need that depth
of burial to successfully contain the device. Those are all the things
I need to know; it is in a tuff unit, the depth of burial, did it make
a surface crater. Mostly I need the depth of the crater, which is
fairly easy to arrive at from overhead photography. After all, we
do it that way now using aerial photographs.
From that information I maintain I can get yields to plus or
minus twenty percent, which is about the same as the rad chem
people do. And, I don't need to do more than that. It's a very
reliable way, at least to me who believes in the process, to verify the
yield.
Carothers: And the reason that it works, presumably, is that
the tuff in the valley is a fairly uniform material, and the cavities
therefore follow a fairly smooth law.
Kunkle: That's right.
Carothers: And as they collapse to the surface, any bulking
from shot to shot is very similar. So, since you mostly want to know
the depth of the crater, you must feel that's related to the size of
the cavity. In a sense you're using the crater to infer a radius for
the cavity. That's what gives you the yield in this uniform material,
in which you've fired enough shots that you have calibrated it, in a
sense. Is that sort of it?
Kunkle: That's it.
Carothers: Well, if I went to some different place, like Pahute
Mesa, where this rock layer is hard and that layer is soft, and this
pillow of lava is here but was not there, it might be much more
difficult.
Kunkle: It's more difficult, but actually the relationship works
fairly well on Pahute Mesa, adjusted for the Mesa because there are
harder rocks and smaller cavities, and less frequency of cratering up
there. But when I adjust for those things, that is, do a Pahute
regression, it works quite well there.
Where it doesn't work well is in the alluvium. I have to know
more about the type of alluvium the shot is in. We certainly see a
larger range of densities, and water contents, and gas porosities in
the alluviums than we do through the other geologic testing units.

Of course, if one knows that such a relationship exists, we have
published enough declassified event yields to calibrate the relation-
ship.
Let me bring up a side issue. In studying the underground
phenomenology from nuclear detonations, I kept coming across this
group of shots that were just odd. Nothing looked quite like it
should. It was interesting group. Then I found out what they were.
If you find a particular kind of device, you throw it out of your
analysis, because people don't know very well what the yield was.
It just became clear to me that those yields have big uncertainties.
And so, one of the things that occasionally comes up in looking
at a proposed shot site is that the neighboring experience may
include some things that look pretty wild. There's a crater there
where there shouldn't have been one, or there isn't one where there
should have been, or this K value looks very strange. But when you
actually look at them, there are these particular devices, and I
usually just tend to ignore them. And there are some that are so odd
that I just, when they come up, gently dismiss them as much as I can.
Very odd things happened on Alva and Marvel. But of course,
you'd certainly expect them to behave differently than other shots.
Carothers: There's another class of shots which ought to effect
the cavity, and thereby the crater. Those are the vertical pipe shots.
Generally they collapsed rather quickly compared to the other
shots. Do they follow your curves?
Kunkle: We really didn't do enough of those. There are a half
a dozen or so, and they're scattered about. They're not a very
uniform group.
As far as collapse times go, I've never been able to predict
them, so I can't say what effect the pipes had on them. One of the
last of these we did was Huron King. It was done the summer I
showed up here. Everyone was very happy that it took fifty-nine
minutes to collapse, because that demonstrated that the pipe must
have had really no effect on it. I suppose that's a good demonstra-
tion, but we had a lot of downhole diagnostics that demonstrated it
better. So, I became acquainted with that argument rather early on.
Collapse times are interesting, and they're interesting because

we can't predict them. For some shots in alluvium in the valley there
are some sort of general rules that allow you to tell if it is going to
collapse in one hour or ten hours, but really no more exactly than
that.
For shots in the valley tuffs, where we can predict if it will
collapse to the surface, and the general size of the surface crater,
and a lot of things about the shot, we can not even get a handle on
collapse times. When the cavity collapses seems nearly a random
process. Certainly if it happened in a minute or two, that would be
very unusual, and in fact, we haven't seen that. Anywhere from one
to ten hours, well, okay. It's been interesting that we just can't do
much better than that.
Carothers: Do you think the water that is present plays a strong
role in the collapse?
Kunkle: By itself, the water, either by weight percent or by
volume percent in the cavity region, that we actually measure,
seems to play no particular role in determining collapse time. It
must be the interaction of the water with the rock. We have shot
in relatively dry sites of four or five or six percent, up to relatively
wet sites in the high twenties. So there's some variation there, but
not as much as you'd like to have for an experiment to see any
effects. But we often see, comparing different shots, factors of ten
difference in collapse times. We see markedly different collapse
times from similar sites with presumably very comparable amounts
of water. I believe that the water, or steam if you like, must play
a role in the collapse, but there's probably enough of it always
present to do whatever it's going to do.
Carothers: Perhaps that's the point. At the Test Site you

rarely shoot in an area with very diferent kinds of rocks.
Kunkle: The collapse times, I found, go hand in hand with
another conundrum I have, which is predicting ground motions.
Ground motions display a range of characteristics which are under-
standable, but not predictable.
For example, a class of shots that has been studied a lot is the
shots in the valley in the tuff units. Usually they have fairly high
design yields. The ground motions fall on log log plots in a very nice
and uniform way when you plot them for maximum velocity and
distance. But they're not the same from shot to shot. On some
shots the velocity falls off very rapidly, and they have correspond-
ingly very high motions toward ground zero. On other shots the
velocity falls off very slowly, or relatively more slowly, with
distance, but they don't have much velocity at surface ground zero.
It's almost as if there's an energy conservation that the amount of
energy under the curve is staying the same, but it's distribution
around surface ground zero can be very different.
The puzzling thing is that we can't predict for any particular
shot which of these behaviors is going to show. The motion will fall
on a well defined curve, but we can't tell in advance what curve that
is, and we can't relate the curve to any of the geological aspects. In
particular, in our tuff pile location, which is a very uniform section
of tuff geology, we have shot very similar shots in very similar
settings; same device, same depth of burial, same location in the
structure. If you had to try to repeat an event, you can't do any
better than that. And they have had completely different ground
motions. And, completely different collapse times.
And the collapse times aren't related to the ground motions
either, by the way. I thought, ah ha, now I'll have some way to
predict collapse times, but no, that didn't pan out. I think that both
collapse times and ground motions are sensitive to the detailed
properties of the close-in geology, the geology near the event work
point.
Carothers: I was about to raise that issue. The shots, you say,
were just about as similar as two shots could be, in terms of yield and
geologic setting. Perhaps so. Yield, sure. On the other hand, they
were probably a thousand of so feet apart. Maybe more. So, they
weren't really in the same geologic setting, except in a general way.
The details near the working point, the inhomogeneities on the scale
of the cavity size, you don't know.
Kunkle: Well, that's true. For some things, like the scaled
cavity size, the inhomogeneities don't seem to matter too much in
the tuff units. For other things, such as the collapse times or ground
motions, it seems to matter very much, and in unpredictable ways.
We don't measure enough to be able to link the downhole measure-
ments with what we see happening post-shot.
Carothers: There are people in the containment community

who might say, "I could believe that some of the results you see are
caused by details of the structure which you guys have never seen.
And you've never seen those details because you don't care about
them, because they don't affect the containment of your shots.
However, you see the effects when you sit down and try to calculate
certain things. Some of that detail could be things such as the
motion of blocks that distribute the energy in different ways on
different shots. Even though the shot points, by your logs and
samples, look the same, they're not the same. The blocks aren't the
same."
Kunkle: I certainly believe that block motion has an effect. By
the way, there is a weak correlation between the joint frequency we
see in holes and the collapse times. And the joint frequency tends
to increase as you move toward the margins of the valley, from the
center, and collapse times decrease as you move out towards the
margins of the valley from the center. Maybe if you have more
joints the blocks at the keystone are smaller, and then they're not
as competent when it comes time to hold the cavity up. Whatever,
there does seem to be some correlation.
1 think the exact positioning of layers, and the impedance
between the various layers in the bedded tuffs plays a part.
Calculationally you see this. Calculated ground motions and
residual stresses are very sensitive to even small variations in the
layer properties you use - - their thicknesses, their positioning. We
found this out on an analysis of the Cottage event, for example. The
standard model was very sensitive to small variations, and we've
seen this in other shots we've tried to calculate. So, the actual
details of the geology often seem to matter. Fortunately, not for a
lot of the containment aspects.
Carothers: Not for the containment aspects of the kind of
events that you do. If your Laboratory said it was necessary to fire
an event which had a Iine-of-sight to the surface, then some of these
things could possibly become important. But for the kinds of events
that Livermore and Los Alamos do these days, simple emplacement
hole shots at a conservative depth of burial, they obviously aren't
important to the containment aspects of the shot.
Kunkle: No. Now, we may see some of these effects reflected

in some of our containment statistics. What I mean by some of them
is the effects of block motions. This is an argument that Carl Keller
has made, and I find it quite persuasive. You can imagine our
emplacement hole as actually the narrowest of soda straws. It's a
pencil line when drawn to actual size on cross sections. And one
phenomenon that probably happens on higher yield shots is block
motion which is large enough to simply shear off the pencil line.
There is then no longer a line running down to the cavity.
You could say that somewhere around fifteen or twenty
kilotons we technically get block motions large enough to shear and
very effectively block off those stemming columns. That may be a
key to containing larger yield events. That's one of the reasons they
may be easier to contain; the ground motions, the chaotic block
motions close in may tend to slide the earth around and seal off the
stemming columns.
So, the cavity sizes and crater dimensions fit nicely in a family.
From that you can assume, or infer, what may be happening in the
ground. The crater size must be reduced somewhat from the cavity
volume, because of bulking of the earth materials. You can work out
a bulking factor by calculating the cavity size and the crater volume,
and looking at the difference in volumes. Now, we can work out a
bulking factor in the tuff that is seven or eight percent, but we can't
a-priori know that. I can't work that out from the mechanical
models, or the physical measurements on the tuff itself. It's
something we simply observe.
And then there's the ground motion. We observe the ground
motions and they're understandable. That is, when a new shot is
done, you look at the ground motion data. It's understandable in
the context of the other shots, but it's not predictable in advance.
Carothers: When you talk about bulking factors, there's the
question of how the collapse occurs. Is it a rain of little pebbles, or
a massive chunk of material that moves down as a unit. What do
you think it is? Or what evidence is there for it being one or the
other?
Kunkle: The only evidence I'm aware of is from drill backs and
reentries on Rainier Mesa. There are downhole movies, and holes
drilled in chimneys, which show perceptible large gaps between the
various blocks, most of the way down.
But this is, of course, a limited set of experience. We

occasionally will drill through the edge of a chimney, or collapsed
area, during the post-shot operation. You commonly lose circula-
tion when you reach that region. That indicates you've reached
some kind of fractured area, but we know little of the mechanical
properties of the chimney material, such as the rubble sizes, and the
spacing between the pieces.
Weart: We did some measurements during the Marshmallow
reentry to see how large the cavity was, how far out it had grown.
To do that we mined in until we intercepted the edge. We followed
certain bedding planes that existed in the tuff, and all of a sudden
we came to an area where, although it was still perfectly solid rock,
it was disrupted. As we continued to mine in it was clear that what
we were now in was a jumble of tuff, and it was not characteristic
of the the material we had been following.
Carothers: You couldn't tell from the mining itself that you
had entered the cavity region? You were still mining in solid,
competent rock?
Weart: Yes. It required no additional support over and above
what we had used out in the rest of the drift. It was tightly
compacted material. I think a lot of people have the picture that
when the cavity collapses there is a rain of rocks of various sizes, and
there is a pile of unconsolidated material that makes up the
chimney.
That was not our experience at the working point depth. Right
at the cavity boundary it was tightly compacted material. We could
find evidence as we mined in of fractures that had developed outside
this cavity radius. They had had molten material injected in them.
It was usually radioactive, but not necessarily so. There wasn't any
indication at all of radioactivity at the boundary of the native rock
and the cavity.
We did contact the cavity on more than one radius. 1 don't
recall if we mined straight through. We might have. We did try to
determine the radius on the horizontal plane, and it wasn't perfectly
spherical. And subsequent shots, like Gum Drop, were not per-
fectly spherical either.
Flangas: When we reentered the Pile Driver cavity, up until we

hit the cavity wall there was nothing to indicate there was anything
beyond. There was a clean interface, and within a matter of inches
we were into the cavity. Now, we've had others where we see the
ground get more and more fractured, and more and more ravelly,
fifteen, twenty feet away from the cavity wall. That's in the tuffs
more. But we've seen them both ways. Ground is not homoge-
neous, it's not consistent.
Carothers: It sure took us a longtime to learn that. Why didn't
you explain that to us sooner?
Flangas: Nobody asked me. My job was digging them, not
figuring them out.
As far as chimneys go, on Rainier we drove a raise up to get
about a hundred feet above the shot horizon, and that's where we
ran into the material that was just powdered. It was just totally
disagreggated. It was like working through flour. Then we used a
technique they call spiling, in order to get that drift across. We
wanted to drift across the cavity and get directly over the ground
zero.
Carothers: What's spiling?
Flangas: Spiling. Spiling is a roof support system that is used
in very loose or blocky ground. Pointed (chisel shaped) wood ( 4 "
x 6") or sometimes metal beams are angled and driven upward and
outward over the leading set with the back end braced over the
preceding set. This cantilever bracing supports an incompetant roof
ahead of the last set and keeps the miners safely under cover while
advancing the heading. So, as we spiled across there we noticed that
material was totally disaggregatted. And from my experience in
block caving, that was a block caver's dream. We could have pulled
rock out of there from now on.
There's a lot of material in that
chimney.
Carothers: Tom, there has

been the picture some people have
presented of a continual process of
decrepitation going on before cav-
ity collapse. There's the heat in
the cavity, it heats up a layer of
rock, turns the water it contains to steam, which then blows off that
layer of rock, and so on. So, the cavity walls are continually flaking
off.
Kunkle: I would expect such pieces of rock to be quite small
compared to the major blocks that would fall in during cavity
collapse. A n d , by and large, the cooling that occurs is from the
energy that is transported into the rock to make it hot. The
conditions near the wall of an underground cavity, following a
nuclear explosion, must be quite suitable for steam vapor explosions
to occur. The rock and the water in the cavity are under a large
pressure. The water in the rock can now be superheated, probably,
to appreciable temperatures before it will flash to steam. At those
high temperatures, the flash of the superheated water to vapor can
have an energy release comparable to a good high explosive. But
the energy has already gone into it, by thermal conductivity, and so
it is already hot steam and water and rock, being added back to the
cavity. The work's already been done, other than the mechanical
work, which is soaked up.
But I think those pieces must be small. You're looking at an
average size of a pocket, even the big ones maybe, of a few
millimeters across. So, you can imagine a little droplet of high
explosive detonating just inside the wall, and scaling off some small
amount of rock. 1 think this is unlikely to contribute to the major
collapse.
Now, there has been a school of thought that believes that the
cavity pressure is related to the collapse time. The model seems to
be that of an impermeable membrane, which allows you to push
against the rock. I've thought that a mechanism that may be more
important in determining when cavities collapse than the steam
pressure inside the cavity is the stress in the rock around the cavity.
If our calculational models are to be believed, we often reach stress
states in the rock immediately surrounding the cavity of compres-
sive stress; the residual stress we like to talk about. That's also
expected to dissipate, as water moves out of pores and relieves that,
and collapse times may be more related to the migration of the
water out of the combined pore spaces than to the actual pressure
decay in the cavity. The two may go hand-in-hand, but we know
very little about any of these mechanisms.
Carothers: When the cavity does collapse, whatever gases

there are in the cavity have to go somewhere. The steam can be
condensed by the cold material that falls in. There is presumably
only a small volume of other gases, so there ought to be a low
pressure in any volume that remains. You might think there would
be flow from the surface down into the chimney until that volume
is filled up.
Kunkle: That's indeed seen in apical voids. It's not unusual,
in a subsurface collapse that extends a fair distance up the hole, to
have a containment diagnostic package survive in the stemming
above. That package comes into communication, through the
stemming materials, with the apical void. For example, on the
Barnwell event, some of the upper pressure transducers showed a
declining pressure soon after the major collapse, as they came into
communication with the reduced pressure in the apical void.
On Rivoli there was a measurement just under the topmost
plug which showed the pressure decreasing, presumably as it came
into equilibration with pressure in the apical void at the top of the
rubble column. So this, indeed, does seem to occur.
I have heard rumors through the years, but I've never seen
written documentation, that when you drill back into standing
cavities, they have sub-atmospheric pressure in them. I'm pretty
sure we've had, at Los Alamos, events in Yucca Flat where we've
drilled back into standing cavities where there were pressures below
atmospheric. They subsequently collapsed. To my knowledge there
are no standing cavities at the Nevada Test Site.
Brownlee: Los Alamos had at least three, and I don't mean that
there might not have been four, shots in which we did a very low
yield in saturated tuff. For us that's unusual, because low yields
would normally be done in alluvium. These happened to be in
saturated tuff.
One time the guys came to me terribly excited because they'd
had this low yield in saturated tuff, and they said, "When we drilled
back, we hit the cavity, and the fans that do the ventilating were
running backwards. A l l the air was going into the shaft; all of a
sudden the cavity was just sucking air. How could that possibly be?"
So I said, "The next time that happens, make sure you estimate how
much air goes in." We had three shots for which we measured the
flow of air into those cavities, and what we found, of course, was
that the amount of air that went in was the volume of the cavity.
So, we had a standing cavity with a vacuum. What you
immediately deduce is that the cavity was small, and in tuff, so it
stood. It didn't fall in. But it was sealed off, and this told us a lot
about gas flow through tuff, and how things could seal.
Carothers: Subsurface collapses, by definition, go part of the
way to the surface, and when they stop, there seems always to be
an apical void above the chimney material. If that void is at low
pressure, the flow will be downward from the surface to fill up this
big vacuum chamber. That is a mechanism which would tend to
militate against any release of gases that might have gotten up that
high. Do you believe that's possible, ]ohn?
Rambo: I like that idea. We saw that happen on Barnwell,
certainly. The pressure dropped, and you could see that on the
downhole gauges. The subsurface collapse tended to draw a
vacuum, and we didn't see any radiation get above where it was
measured at the stemming platform, which was very high in the
hole, about four hundred meters up. And so, 1 think that downward
flow certainly does happen.
There were a set of experiments carried out by Ed Peterson, of
S-Cubed, sponsored by DNA, which had to do with whether there
was any containment threat if a shot site was situated close to the
chimney of a previous event. Data was sought as to whether or not
there might be flow of gas through the old chimney to the surface.
Peterson: At the time we did the chimney pressuriztion
measurements there were a couple of things that were coming up.
One was that they were going to shoot Hybla Gold near a nuclear
chimney, and they were worried about, if they got gases from the
shot into the chimney, would they then leak up to the surface very
rapidly. If you place events reasonably close together, and if you
get rapid gas flow into an old chimney, could those gases end up
going up to the surface rapidly? That was the motivation. It was
a pretty much a containment-type question.
Carothers: Wouldn't it be reasonable for me to ask, "Why

would you be concerned about gases going up an old collapse
chimney? After all, there was a shot there, the chimney formed,
and gases didn't go up it from the original shot. Why would it do
that from another shot?
Peterson: That is an extremely legitimate question. And it is
probably correct that if there were another shot, and it didn't
collapse, then there would be all the steam in the cavity, and there
would be a horrendous drive because of the steam pushing all the
noncondensables Then you could make the argument, just as you
did, that the steam is going to condense in the old chimney, because
the first one didn't leak either. What you say is true.
I don't know all the motivations for those measurements, but
I think we are now in a world in which not everybody who looks at
the problem understands all the details of what goes on. So, if you
do a test and measure something, and say, "Okay, we did the test
and measured it. And so, now that we've measured it, we sort of
know what happens," it makes it much more believable to a large
portion of the community.
Carothers: I believe that. What kinds of things did you do?
Peterson: The thing we did on those tests was, we injected air
slightly above the working point level through a drill hole. They
drilled a slant hole going up at fifteen degrees, from one of the
underground drifts, and came into the chimney some fifty to a
hundred feet above the working point. Through this hole we
injected air, plus a tracer such as sulfur hexafluoride. Then we
measured the pressure through a drill hole that was drilled from the
surface down to the top of the chimney. We also measured the
pressure in another drill hole that came in horizontally. That one
went in near where the working point originally was. In all three of
those holes we could measure pressure, and tracer gas concentra-
tion. We also, on the surface, put out three circular arrays so we
could take air samples every thirty degrees around the surface
ground zero. Those we could analyze for the tracers.
Basically we maintained a constant flow rate, and looked at the
pressure response as a function of time. On most of our chimney
tests 1 believe we were flowing gas in at about three thousand cubic
feet per minute. It was between one and three thousand, some-
where around that. Eventually, after twenty hours or so, we could
build up the pressure in the chimney to maybe three, four, five psi.
We put in numbers of millions of cubic feet of gas. You can
model it, and we found we could model it very well. From the model
we could calculate what would happen if we let the pressure decay,
and built it up again, and so forth. So, we got to the point where
we thought we could understand reasonably well the conditions in
the chimney. We did three chimneys, and 1 think we did seven tests
on those three chimneys, which were from Dining Car, Ming Blade,
and Mighty Epic.
1 believe some of the motivation for using the Mighty Epic
chimney was because Diablo Hawk was going to be done in that
general vicinity. I think we verified, if nothing else, that gas doesn't
come up to the surface from those chimneys.
Carothers: Is that because, although the chimney may have a
lot of cracks, and the gas goes up to the top of the chimney, there
is then some amount of material from the top of the chimney to the
surface of the Mesa, and that's what's really keeping the gas in?
Peterson: Yes, one can make that argument. 1 believe it was
on Dining Car where, when we did our first test, we actually
detected gases up on the Mesa at positions that were probably on
the order of two or three hundred feet from the surface ground zero.
Subsequently, after the USGS came out and looked at it, they found
a region there that was fractured. The fractures went down at about
a thirty degree angle, and would intersect the uncased bore hole that
went down into the top of the chimney. Subsequently that bore
hole was cased, and we did another test. Nothing came up to the
surface.
So, in that case we really made the right guess — the material
above the chimney was what kept the gas in. I can't remember the
exact numbers, but we probably put in two to four million cubic feet
of gas, and our guess is that at the most, even when we detected it,
maybe less than a hundred cubic feet had come out on the Mesa.
The tracers are very sensitive, to one part to ten to the twelfth.
If we had been testing over a chimney that was in alluvium,
where you wouldn't necessarily get the flow through the fractures,
we would then have put some type of a tarp on the surface, and
collected the gas under it. That way. if it does ooze up over a large
region, you can still pick it up. I think that what we showed was that
there was no gross flow. These slight oozings — I don't think one
can tell. But I think the amounts would be so small that it would be
almost impossible to detect, no matter what it was that was oozing
up at that rate.
Carothers: The conclusion that I would arrive at is that indeed
I can safely detonate a device quite close to an old chimney, because
it is no more of a flow path than the new chimney that's going to
form.
Peterson: I think that's true. If you're looking purely at the
fluid flow aspects of it, what you say it true.
Carothers: How else should I look at it?
Peterson: Well, because DNA has a iine-of-sight, and ground
shock closures, and things like that on the tunnel events, if you do
put another shot too close to an old chimney, you may affect the
ground motion in a manner that might adversely affect some other
part of the system.
Carothers: You're implying that the properties of the chim-
ney, of this material which has fallen in, are different from the
surrounding materials, and so you can't treat it as similar to, or the
same as the rest of medium?
Peterson: That's true. It may be a perturbation to the ground
motion. But I think from the fluid flow and leakage point of view
what you say it very true.
Carothers: Do you think that would be true in alluvium as well?
Peterson: I think so. I see no reason why it wouldn't be. On
Pahute, Livermore has done shots where they get some collapse, or
partial collapse, and there are little fractures that ooze small
amounts of activity from atmospheric pumping. But they are very
small amounts. The thing is, you can count anything, jim. It's like
our sulfer hexafluoride — there are just molecules that came out.
With the measurement capabilities that people have today you can
measure far below anything the EPA says is significant for anything,
or that anyone else says is significant. You can measure molecules
of anything, like our tracer. And there are a lot of molecules. It's
true that Caesar's last breath is still floating around, and every
breath you draw in should have a molecule or two of Caesar's last
breath. One can mathematically show it.
Carothers: Carl, the Test Site, including the tunnels, is used
as a two dimensional grid, as far as siting events goes, and there are
some arbitrary rules about how far from an old chimney a new event
should be located. Eventually, perhaps, for various reasons, people
could be forced locate events closer than those rules would allow.
My impression is that nobody really knows very much about what
the properties of the chimneys are, and so they stay away from them
because they don't know.
Keller: That's right.
Carothers: Do you think that could become an issue in the
future?
Keller: I think that if there were a few measurements of
chimney permeabilities, and measurements outside those same
chimneys, to develop real data on what the relative permeability is,
inside versus outside, then you could be much more quantitative
about how close you could get. The gas flow codes we have now
would easily handle that problem. There are some kinds of sitings
that are already all right. You can shoot, certainly, well underneath.
1 don't see anything wrong with dropping one chimney into another.
Carothers: No, 1 don't either. No one has done it though.
Keller: No. Well, they've gotten close. But 1 think in that case
you don't have to be very quantitative to convince yourself it's all
right.
The thing that I think is most compelling for the measurement
of permeabilities in the chimneys is the C02 question. As they site
in different areas, and they encounter higher C02 contents, they
will have to be more explicit about what is an acceptable level. The
standard five percent that has been the threshold of concern is based
on an analysis of seeps, which occurred all over the site and includes
events like Diagonal Line and a bunch of Livermore shots. There's
a whole area which Livermore uses that has a high C02 content. It's
also fairly well cemented. It's very important that the threshold of
concern for C02 is very medium dependent. If you're shooting in
a material where the chimney is not significantly different from the
native material in permeability, you can go to very high levels of

C 0 2 . And in fact, some events were shot in carbonate rock; Nash,
and Bourbon, and Handcar.
Carothers: Nash also leaked.
Keller: Yes, but Bourbon didn't, and so you wonder why.
Well, Bourbon was deep enough. Seeps depend on the path, and if
it's long enough, it can even be fairly permeable. Jack House paid
for some work on the relationship of C 0 2 and medium properties
to leaks, and that will be very useful for him if permeability
measurements are made. Now, as I have said, you can infer
permeabilities from the leak arrival times, but that assumes you
know what the C 0 2 generation is, and that's kind of a flaky number.
There are the arguments about whether cuttings or sidewall samples
give you a good number, and how you should average, and so on.
So one doesn't know the inventory very well.
Carothers: Russ, you have said that there are indications that
things other than the simple movement of gases from the detonation
through the chimney toward the surface go on in the chimney after
the shot.
Duff: When the early Plowshare activity in S-Cubed came
along, I had an opportunity on Gasbuggy to look at the chemistry
of a nuclear chimney. We had extensive measurements of gas
composition over time, after the shot. Chuck Smith, at Livermore,
did measurements not only on the composition of the gas - - carbon
dioxide and air and methane and ethane, and so forth - - he also
looked at HD, HT, H2, HTO. So, we had not only chemistry, we
had isotopic chemistry. I tried to develop for El Paso Natural Gas,
who were the commercial partner, a model which would explain all
of those measurements in a consistent fashion. I think we did, and
it is a very different model from what the Laboratory developed.
One thing that came out of it was the postulate that during
collapse some of the hot rock was elevated, or at least not flooded
by the condensate. So, over a period of six months there was a
continuing series of reactions at these hot rock surfaces between the
various chemical species. There must have been hot spots in the
chimney, and by hot I mean six, seven, eight hundred degrees
Kelvin, that lasted for six months.
Carothers: That's not the conventional wisdom.
Duff: Of course it is not. But you look at all the chemical

evidence, and ask, "How can you explain that?" Well, I could
explain it by a series of assumptions, and continuing reactions were
required. So far as I know nobody else has tried to explain why the
chemistry changed over six months. But it did. That was my first
effort to apply concepts of equilibrium chemistry to the nuclear
explosion environment.
In the DN A program there have been a number of places where
chemical concerns might be important. We have long seen explo-
sive gases in the tunnel after the shot. Where do they come from?
Carothers: Joe LaComb recently said they were finding
hydrogen during their reentry, but it's clean, so it doesn't come
from the cavity.
Duff: Well, I haven't thought it came from the cavity for a long
time. I've been promoting for four or five years the idea that DNA
was seeing the effects of reactions between grout and metal, making
hydrogen. Since the grout, in particular superlean grout, is made
with desert fines, there is carbonate in it. There have been a lot of
chemical calculations which have been done, and reported, which
can explain the presence of a lot of carbon monoxide, and little
carbon dioxide. In the cavities we're dealing with there should be
a lot of carbon dioxide. The stuff that shows up in the tunnels is
carbon monoxide, and right there is evidence that it is not cavity
gas.
There is some radioactivity in these gases, and I think that
represents fission products that get into the very early prompt flow.
They get mixed into the stemming, and then are purged out of the
stemming by late-time reactions which make hydrogen and carbon
monoxide, which then seep into the tunnel complex. That was
behind my suggestions a couple of years ago of putting some
manganese dioxide into the system to try to control the late-time
reactions.
Carothers: I recall that Livermore put manganese dioxide
around the device canister on a few shots in the sixties.
Duff: jade is one. It was done in a radiochemical context.
They were trying to modify the oxidation states of certain fission
product oxides so the radiochemical collection process would be
Cavity Collapse. Chimneys and Craters 289
better. Before that work came to any particular fruition, as I

understand it other chemical techniques were developed and it was
dropped.
I've been talking to Joe LaComb and various other people
about chemical related activities. Bob Bass was receptive, and he
got Sandia to make some gas sampling systems. They have been
fielded on a couple of events now. I am professionally gratified to
hear Joe LaComb make comments as he did at a recent CEP meeting,
saying that maybe, in fact, chemistry is important. I've been saying
for a long time now, "Chemistry is a perfectly good branch of
physics. There's information there, let's extract i t . " So, I think
there is an avenue of potential advance which I look forward to DNA
exploring.
Carothers: The only chemistry I ever hear about at the CEP

concerns how many tons of carbonate rock will be affected per
kiloton, or some brief mention of the iron in the canister, and how
much hydrogen will be produced from that.
Duff: I know. I know. Some four years ago I got hold of a suite
of gas sampling data from Livermore, and tried to see what it told
us about iron reactions, and how much rock was able to give up
carbon dioxide, and so forth. It was surprising data, because there
were shots that were right, in the sense that they had big amounts
of iron around, they were in tuff, and you'd expect under those
circumstances to be a lot of hydrogen, and indeed there was. There
were other cases where there was a minimal amount of iron, the shot
was in alluvium, with relatively high amounts of carbonates, where
you'd expect carbon dioxide to dominate and it did. But there were
also cases where the reverse was true, There were cases where
where you'd expect lots of carbon dioxide and instead you got lots
of hydrogen. Or you expected lots of hydrogen and you got lots of
carbon dioxide.
Another problem, which is long standing, was shown in
Gasbuggy, but it is also true in all of the Livermore gas sampling.
Why is there so much ethane and propane found in the gas after a
shot?
Carothers: Now Russell, there aren't any hydrocarbons at the
Nevada Test Site. There is tuff, and clay, and lavas, and such like,
but there isn't any ethane or propane. You might expect to find that
in a gas field, but certainly not in Nevada.
Duff: There's hydrogen and there's carbon dioxide at NTS.

And at high temperatures these react, and you get methane, a
detectable and measurable amount, like one percent. And, if you
look at Chuck Smith's gas sampling data there is ethane and propane
found and reported. In equilibrium you expect that hydrocarbon
series to be down about five orders of magnitude as you go through
each step. The mystery to me is that the observation is one order
of magnitude between methane, ethane, and propane. One order
of magnitude for each step, and we calculate five or six.
Carothers: At five orders of magnitude per step 1 would think
it would be very difficult to see propane, and perhaps you might not
even see the ethane.
Duff: That's right, but we do see them. Now, 1 don't have the
foggiest idea what the implication or importance of that is, but it is
a mystery which has been around since Gasbuggy. 1 firmly believe
that when we see something that is a surprise, we have a chance to
learn something we didn't know. When we see what we expected
to see, we haven't learned anything new. And so, it's in this context
that 1 want to understand that mystery. Not because 1 think it's
going to be better than sliced bread, or somehow take care of the
national debt; it's not that kind of important. But I think there may
be something about the phenomenology which is hidden, at the
present time, in that particular observation. So, as a guy who is
interested more in the scientific aspects of things than in meeting the
schedule, I am intrigued. And, 1 think there may be something of
value there.
We have a situation in the gas sampling area, which 1 think is
fortuitous. We are getting data, and we've been able to pretty much
make sense of it. For instance, on Mission Cyber we were able to
say, from gas samples, that in the chimney the cavity gas was
seventy-three percent hydrogen and twenty-seven percent carbon
dioxide, with a little bit of other stuff. We've got three measure-
ments at different times, and we get essentially the same answer
each time. That's not really a profound thing, but it allows us to
investigate the whys. What temperatures, what pressures would
give rise to that answer? 1 wish this had happened a decade ago so
I'd have some professional time to try to do something with it. It
will be the next generation who gets to exploit it, and I hope there
is somebody who wants to champion that kind of work, because I
think there is an opportunity for major success there.
291
11
The Residual Stress Cage
What is important in the containment of an underground nuclear

explosion? Certainly the depth at which the explosion takes place
is crucial. Obviously a detonation on the surface of ground will
release the products of the explosion to the atmosphere. A detona-
tion taking place miles underground would certainly be expected to
be completely contained, barring some man-made feature which
would provide a path to the surface. "Deeper is better." The
Iithostatic stress, which is always there, works to prevent the
formation of any openings through which high pressure gases might
escape, and as the weight of the overburden becomes greater the
energy released can no longer lift the overlying material as far, and
so on.
However, great depths of burial create difficult and very
expensive problems to solve. What is a depth of burial at which the
containment of the detonation products confidently can be ex-
pected, but which is no greater than required for that confidence?
For the moment we will put aside consideration of the man-made
features such as line-of-site pipes, cables, stemming columns, and
other such things.
There are three principal phenomena, aside from the Iithostatic
stress and the overburden weight that are thought to play important
roles in the containment of the detonation products of a nuclear
explosion. The importance of any of these mechanisms, or whether
any one of them is important at all, or possibly even exists at all in
the context of containment has been the subject of extended debate.
Certainly they exist, but when they occur and to what degree they
influence a particular event is a matter more of opinion than of
demonstrable fact. Nonetheless, detonations are contained, regard-
less of the minimal understanding of these mechanisms.
One is what in the earliest days of underground testing was
called the "mystical magical membrane," and is variously referred
to today as the "residual stress," the "stress cage," or the "containment
cage." It comes about, in theory, when the rock materials that have
been pushed out by the passage of the shock wave, and compressed,
move back toward the cavity and set up a region around the cavity
where the hoop stresses in the rock are greater than the cavity
pressure. Hence, gases in the cavity cannot be forced through that
region.
Another postulated mechanism is hydrofracturing, or crack-
ing, of the rock near the cavity by the gases which are at high
pressures in the cavity. Such a crack exposes additional cold
surfaces, and speeds the cooling of the cavity material, reducing the
high pressures that might force materials toward the surface. Hence,
they could reduce the flow from the cavity, and be beneficial to
containment. On the other hand, such fractures would seem to
provide paths for flow of gases toward the surface, or perhaps to
some plane of weakness such as fault. As such they could be a threat
to the containment of the event.
The third, thought to be sometimes important in tunnel events
where a line-of-sight pipe is used, is block motion. This refers to
fact that upon tunnel reentries very large blocks of rock have been
observed to have moved many feet. Such motion could conceivably
be good for containment by moving a very thick block of material
across the tunnel, effectively sealing it. Or, it could be bad by
destroying or interfering with the action of the mechanical closure
hadware typically used on line-of-sight shots.
There is, of course, the possibility that all three of these things
might occur in various degrees on every detonation, either reinforc-
ing or interfering with each other in the containment of the gases. In
a similar way, it is difficult to confine the discussion of peoples'
opinions about why shots contain to just one of these mechanisms.
This chapter will consider principally residual stress, the next
hydrofractures, and the one following that, block motion.
Carothers: In the earliest days of the underground program
there were people who said, "I don't understand why every shot
doesn't hydrofract to the surface and vent. Why do they stay there?
Everything is diverging, everything is being pulled apart, there is this
high pressure gas, and it should hydrofract to the surface very
quickly. But it doesn't do that." There were other people who said,
"Well, there is some sort of mystical magical membrane that keeps
it from doing that. There has to be, because otherwise, you're right,
you couldn't contain an underground shot."
The Residual Stress Cage 293
Higgins: just right. And that argument is correct, and all of

the descriptions of what that mystical magical membrane was were
there. We just didn't really stop to look. There were clues about
the residual stress that we found on Rainier. When we went back and
examined the sandbags that had been in the stemming around
Rainier, we found that the sand, which was just loose tuff that had
been shoveled out of the tunnel and put into cloth bags, was now
so hard that we had to use pick axes to remove them. The sand was
as tight and as solid as the original tuff. Surprising, we thought, but
we ignored the clue.
That compaction, we said, was due to the passage of the shock
wave. But when we tried to compact materials with plane shocks in
the laboratory, we didn't get that. So we said, "I wonder why that
is," and ignored the clue that the rebound recompaction was an
important part of the containment process. People used to refer to
something they called the "mystical magical membrane." Well, it
has a real basis in physics, but by using that term we tended to
dismiss it as a part of the overall process. That's where the physics
should have included the business of rebound, and what we now
refer to as the containment cage.
Roland Herbst gave a long talk about this along about 1 960 or
1 961. He remarked about the fact, and we reduced the argument
to the plane wave case, that following the passage of a shock there
was reverse motion, or rebound, in the direction from which the
shock had come. So, you had not described everything when you
talked, in a shock tube, about the passage of the shock wave itself.
I said, "You mean the shock rebounds from the other end." And
he said, "No, no, no. Make the tube infinitely long. After the shock
passes, a little while later the material will go back the other way.
There will be a rebound. That's because the material now knows
there was a shock wave." We argued about this, and he convinced
me that yes, if there was an initial pressure, or an initial number of
atoms per cubic centimeter, there would be rebound without any
reflection. Knowing that there is a rebound, what we then should
have said was that after a period of time the material comes back and
recompresses. It's the physical nature of the approximately spheri-
cal cavity that makes it persist. It's simply the recompaction of the
rock, which is considerable.
Bob Browniee has a series of photographs he's put together

from the atmospheric test series. In many of the early atmospheric
tests we had smoke rockets that were fired prior to the shot to leave
a curtain of tracers in the atmosphere, so we could watch the air
shock from the atmospheric burst, and calculate its dispersion and
strength and so forth. We were looking at some of those photo-
graphs one day and Bob said, "Watch the smoke trail go by." We
were looking at a long view of some bunkers, and the smoke rocket
trail went by from left to right, and he said, "Now, watch it come
back." And I said, "Recompaction." We had all of the physics in
front of our eyes way back in the 1952, 1953 period from the
atmospheric tests, because the air does the same thing. When the
shock wave goes by, that's not the end; it comes back again. And
that's the recompaction in the air.
I think we saw these things, and we didn't think about the
importance of them, or that they really were clues to something far
broader than we had constructed a concept for.
The point I'm trying to make is that the rebound is a necessary
part of the shock expansion, and one that we ignore because of our
calculational mind set. We run calculational problems in an artificial
one-dimensional framework, which is okay; we can put even a
boundary out there, and it sort of works for most things. Except,
it doesn't properly tell us the rest of the story. What happens after
the shock wave is gone? For a long time we were happy if we could
run a one-dimensional computer simulation of a nuclear explosion
out to ten microseconds. That made the cavity start to grow, and
all these things start to happen, and the shock wave was gone out
of the problem. But we didn't ask what happened after that.
Rimer: I was amazed when I came to S-Cubed that people were
talking about this "mystical magical membrane," when, to a civil
engineer, there was nothing mystical or magical about it at all. The
residual stress concept for metals, structures, and concrete is a very
well known and well established concept in civil engineering.
Carothers: What kinds of things bring that about? Certainly
not a shock wave.
Rimer: Plastic failure, under a non-uniform stress distribution.
Say you take a column and press on it. That's a uniform stress
distribution; it doesn't introduce residual stresses. But if you take
a beam and put a load on it, you introduce compression on the top,
tension on the bottom, and so you get a nonuniform stress distribu-
tion through the beam. Or, the torsion of a cylinder. If you load
it into the plastic regime, the outside fibers get loaded higher, and
they go plastic first. When you take the load off, stresses get locked
in. That's a well known concept in civil engineering.
Carothers: Well, we didn't have any civil engineers considering
this problem. A l l we had were physicists and calculator types.
Rimer: That's right.
Broyles: I don't remember who really came up with the actual
idea of the stress cage. It was based on some calculations, but it was
fairly nebulous. When you look back at it, it's so simple that a high
school physics student can understand it. When you deform
something classically, and stretch it out elastically, it rebounds, and
is going to have a residual stress.
Carothers: That wasn't appreciated by people for a long time.
Broyles: No, and we at Sandia didn't either. And it's not at
all clear yet under what conditions, particularly in alluvium, are you
going to get how much of a stress cage, or how consistently, or
regularly. I think it's quite clear-cut that in tuffaceous materials you
regularly get a stress cage, and that there's creep, and that it decays.
And that you can cause perturbations in it, and get yourself in
trouble with things like line-of-sight pipes sticking through it.
We got started, and Wendell Weart got started, worrying about
hydrofracing as a way of breaking out of the cavity. He started
trying to understand how you could have calculations which said
you had several times overburden pressure in the cavity, and not
have the stuff get out of the cavity. We then developed, and did the
first in-situ measurements, using high explosives, that really demon-
strated the containment stress cage, I don't claim that Sandia
invented the idea of the stress cage, but 1 think we really pursued
it, and proved it in a real environment, even though we were
devoting most of our efforts to the line-of-sight shots.
Bass: I believe I have seen firm evidence of the existence of a

residual stress situation, in some situations in the field - - but in a
homogeneous rock. Years and years ago we did two experiments at
Sandia. A fellow named Lynn Tyler did a residual stress experiment
called Puff and Tuff. I did all the calculations on that thing, and I'm
very proud of Puff and Tuff. It was a beautiful experiment. We fired
a 256 pound charge, which had two pipes looking at it. One came
down the tunnel we used to put the charge in. We put a funnel on
the front of it, where it went to the HE. That was calculated to keep
the pipe open, so the gas would come down, and then be there
available to crack the formation. It is very important that you put
the funnel on; otherwise the hydrodynamics will close off the pipe
right away, and you get no gases in it. The tunnel was stemmed, of
course.
When we were first designing the experiment, that was the only
pipe we planned. AI Church, of the firing group, was sitting in on
the meeting on firing the HE, and he said, "Why don't you just drill
a hole on beyond the charge, and have one that is in the tuff, not
in the stemming?" So, after we excavated the place for the charge,
we drilled a hole on into the tuff. It was six inches in diameter, and
we put a transite pipe in it and forgot about it. And again we put
this funnel on. Thank God Allen suggested that pipe, because that
one worked, and the one in the stemming didn't work at all.
So we fired the shot. The HE gases went down the pipe in the
tuff, right away, and delivered enough pressure at the end to crack
the rock. We know it got down there very quickly because we had
a pressure gauge at the end of the pipe in the stemming to find out
when the gas got down there, and it got down there like a bat out
of hell. We had calculated where the residual stress should be, and
when we went back in there was no cracking at all for one cavity
radius beyond the original cavity. Then all of a sudden we have a
vertical crack that goes up and down as far as you can see, with black
detonation products all through it. But there's absolutely no crack
where we calculated the existence of a residual stress field. Now,
I think that is very good evidence.
There was one thing that was bad about the experiment. That
was, we did change the stresses in the tunnel by the excavation. In
the same place where this residual stress field would be, we had a
modified stress state due to the excavation. This always has to be
considered. There's some creep that will take place, and there will
be some differences. But indeed, you could go back in there and for
a full cavity radius there was no crack at all. We used the Alpine
Miner when we went back in, and we stopped it every six or eight
inches, and did a complete map of the area.
Now, something very interesting happened with the pipe in the
stemming. We closed that pipe in the stemming. That stemming
was supposedly GSRM - - rock matching stemming grout. Now, you
know as well as I do, it doesn't match at all. Indeed, we closed the
pipe in the stemming; we did not close the pipe in the tuff. I think
that this happens should be known in the containment community.
On Carl Smith's high explosive experiments we do see some
stress records that look good, and there may be an indication of
residual stress on those. I believe I've seen residual stress twice.
Once was on Puff and Tuff; the other was a precursor to Puff and
Tuff. That was a five pound cylindrical HE charge. It was the first
thing that Lynn Tyler did.
After the shot Lynn got a very bright guy to go in and dig it out.
This guy had nothing better to do, and he went in there with a dental
pick, a tiny chisel, and a paint brush, and dug it out like an
archeologist. He found a cavity, a nice little cavity, elongated
because of the cylindrical charge. Of course it was small, and the
material was a nice smooth, very homogeneous, weak tuff, with no
cracks in it at all. Then he found a region that didn't look like the
same stuff at all. It had absolutely no structure to it. He did find
some little cracks too; right on the edge of the cavity he found some
circumferential cracks. Then he got into this region of absolute
mush. He went into this region, which was about the same size as
the cavity. Then he went to the edge of that material, and he found
circumferential cracks all the way around, and radial cracks running
all over hell. Now, I claim that is a stress cage. A n d , unfortunately,
I have just given you the best write up known to man. It has never
been documented, and I cannot get the man who did it to do that.
Carothers: Carl, your gauges can survive for a little while in a

ten kilobar regime. It would seem it would be fairly straightforward
for you to make measurements at, say, one kilobar.
Smith: One kilobar is pretty close to the crossover point,
where things last forever.
Carothers: Then you should be able to make measurements

which would address the question of whether there is actually such
a thing as a residual stress cage, or whether it is a figment of the
calculator's imagination. Have you done any work on that?
Smith: That has been a prime question for ten years.
Carothers: If it's still a question, you must not have gotten the
answer.
Smith: On the HE shots, at a kilobar and below, we have long-
term measurements that do show the existence of the residual stress
cage, very clearly and unequivocally. These are from both the stress
gauges that show a long-term offset, and also from the motion
gauges, which are integrated accelerometers, that show the re-
bound. They show you the material coming back in, and when you
look at the calculations you will see that motion is what sets up the
residual stress cage. That's really quite clear from the HE tests,
which go from eight pounds up to two thousand pounds. In
addition, we have been quite successful in measuring cavity pres-
sures on most of those HE shots.
Carothers: If your measurements clearly show the existence of
a region of long-term higher stress around your shots, why are there
still arguments about whether or not there is what is called a residual
stress cage, which presumably is the principal mechanism which
causes nuclear events to be contained?
Smith: I suspect that nowadays everyone sort of believes there
is residual stress, because it's been talked about and thought about
for so long. But, good valid measurements on the nuclear scale are
very hard to come by, and I think this is related to the inhomogenieties
of the field. On the HE scale we were doing experiments in very
selected areas, and we very carefully explored the geology ahead of
time to make sure we had a good uniform material. We took a lot
of samples to have it characterized, and so we had a lot of data for
the calculators to play with. It was an almost homogeneous bed to
work in, without fractures and faults, or major discontinuities. But
when you go to the nuclear scale, you are encompassing all those
geologic problems. The argument may be more now, "What are the
departures from a homogeneous region, and how do these depar-
tures affect the residual stress?" Maybe these departures are
sufficient to negate it to some extent, or in some regions.
While I was doing hydrofrac work I was also involved with the
measurements on the DNA nuclear shots. Occasionally Don Eilers
would talk Bob Bass into making measurements on some of his
vertical shots, and so there were about a half dozen vertical shots,
including some LLL shots, where we did some measurements.
Carothers: When you're working in the tunnels you're always
working in the tuffs. Were the vertical shots deep enough that they
were in the tuffs too?
Smith: Most of them were, but there was one I remember that
was in the alluvium. That was U1 Obe, one of the Livermore shots.
It was a low yield thing, and we got some fairly nice measurements
on that. It was the early days of the gypsum concrete plugs, and
there were two stress measurements in one of those plugs; one at the
top, and one near the bottom. They saw a little over half a kilobar,
and after the dynamic phase they came down and showed about a
hundred bar offset. We were recording the signals on a tape deck,
which would run out of tape at about eight minutes. But, at about
seven minutes these signals, which had been decaying, got down to
zero stress level. So, those are a couple of measurements in alluvium
that suggest there was a residual stress field loading that stemming
plug. And so there are these bits and pieces of measurements on
nuclear shots which say, "Yes, there's a residual stress."
Carothers: If you have a shock that's moving out in an infinite

medium, after the shock has passed the material moves back a bit,
doesn't it?
Rambo: Yes. I see that in the calculations. I think that's part
of the fundamental process. There's material outside of the plastic
region which responds in an elastic way. The wave runs through and
pushes things out, and that whole elastic area outside of the plastic
region tends to want to come back in an elastic type rebound. Even
the plastic area does some of that.
So, for a brief period, we see in calculations, and it certainly
is up for endless discussion, that there is a rebound. The data that
we look at, in terms of velocity data, tends to show that also; the
overdriven system wants to come back a little bit, to flow back, or
to compress around the cavity. In the calculations we tend to see
that kind of motion. We think that's the source of our residual stress
field, and that's the source of what helps us in containment. That's
without respect to any reflections from layers, or the surface. Those

tend to come, usually, after the rebound for a lot of events, but of
course there are some that come earlier due to where layers are.
We see this motion in the velocity gauges that are put around
many of the shots. You see the peak wave, and then the velocity
starts to come back. If you integrate those, in many cases you get
the motion of the material coming back, either to where it was or
maybe not quite as far, depending on where you are. There are
many cases where it comes back all the way, but there are a few cases
where it doesn't.
The surface of the ground is a free surface, so the stress at the
surface is, in the calculations, always zero. So, there is a reflection
back, and it runs back down toward the shot. Spall is the occurrence
of the doubling of the particle velocities at the surface. They're
traveling twice as fast as the particles do from down below, and so
the groumd tends to break apart. You see a rise at the surface that,
if you have a sharp wave front, will go twice as fast as the particles
do down below. And so this sends a signal that is releasing the stress.
Carothers: The shock goes out as a compressional wave, and
is reflected back as a tension wave? It tends to pull the residual stress
cage apart, in a sense?
Rambo: That's exactly right. Bob Terhune was worried about
this tension, or rarefaction wave coming back from the surface on
some particular shots. He thought he was able to see, in the
calculations, some shots that had difficulties because high velocities
brought this rarefaction wave back before the residual stress had
time to set up. In the calculations, and I'm not sure I can answer
exactly why in all cases, but if the rarefaction gets back before or
during the time of the setup of the residual stress, it doesn't behave
as well, at least in the calculations, and it may not set up right. And
that may be a detriment to containment.
Hudson: I would say that the idea of a residual stress field as

the key to containment is little more than a myth.
Carothers: You have attempted to make measurements of the
residual stress field on some nuclear shots, haven't you?
Hudson I have. Not very successfully. I have one set of data
on a low yield event, where the stress in the ground, in the vicinity
of the deepest plug, which turned out to be about where the residual
stress field was expected, peaked at about a kilobar, or a little less,

which was about where it was supposed to. It then fell rapidly to
an almost steady state level at perhaps a fourth of a kilobar, which
was kind of what was expected, or predicted for residual stress. I
even published this, not too widely, but within the community. The
data were criticized because there was no way we could demonstrate
that the gauge had not been significantly affected by the strain in the
medium.
This whole subject is called the inclusion problem. If you're in
a stress regime where the ground behaves as a fluid, you don't have
a problem, and you can probably make very good stress measure-
ments. That boundary is probably at three or four kilobars. Above
three or four kilobars almost everything acts, in the ground anyway,
like a fluid. So, if you can measure the pressure, you probably know
what the stress is. When you get below, say, one kilobar, then
you're trying to make a measurement in a material which doesn't
necessarily expand again after it is compressed. The result is that
you can have a residual strain - - residual compression, residual
expansion, what have you - - that continues to make the gauge feel
like it's in a higher or lower stress field, when it really may not be.
So, I sort of gave up on making residual stress measurements.
They're almost imponderable.
Carothers: There was somebody who said that he could not

think of any kind of stress gauge that you can make that isn't
sensitive to strain.
Hudson: These stress gauges I'm talking about were designed
so they could be corrected for strain. Some materials are much
more sensitive to strain than others, and some are much more
sensitive to stress than they are to strain. So, by using the right
combination of materials you can subtract out the strain. But it's
still hard to convince everyone that you've properly accounted for
the problem.
App: I don't believe we know as much about the residual stress
as we once thought we did. The people who have looked at the
stress cage more closely than anybody have been the DNA. They
have better control, because they're able to mine back, and they can
use more gauging at working point level than we can. I've looked
at the data that Carl Smith and Bob Bass have been collecting.
We've been using that data, and it's interesting that they cannot
consistently see a residual stress in their stress measurements. Now,
it may be an instrumentation problem, or it may be that the residual
stress really is absent, or at least different than the way we model
it. I don't know which. Calculations certainly show the formation
of a residual stress field. There's no doubt about that. But that
doesn't mean it actually exists in nature.
Carothers: There are people who might say something like the
following: "The physics is right. The codes are right. And if you
lived in a uniform, homogeneous world, and you calculated what
was going to happen, you would see a residual stress cage, and it
would be there. But you don't live in such a world."
App: Well, the codes are pretty good at looking at the
potential effects of layering, and non-homogenieties. One suspi-
cion is that material that has been shocked, has been worked, has
been strained, and has had tremendous pore pressures built up due
to trapped water, is a completely different material than it started
out as. It loses its strength, and cannot support a residual stress
field.
Some of the theoretical models predict no stress cage. The
physics in the effective stress models would suggest that, out at least
to some range, you have zero strength in the material. Now, the
material has to have some residual shear strength in order to have
a residual stress field. It has to be able to support deviatoric stress,
or stress differences, in order to have a stress field of the type we're
referring to, where the stress tangential to the cavity is higher than
any other stress component. If the shear strength goes to zero, you
can't have a residual stress field. There has to be some residual
strength in that rock. Now, the question is, does that material have
essentially no residual shear strength?
Russ Duff, of S-Cubed, has questioned the role of the residual
stress as the principal agent of containment. As he expresses it, it
is not the physics used in developing the calculational codes, but the
presumptions upon which they are based that should be called into
question.
Duff: The important observation, to me, in the Rainier

reentry, was that the explosion developed a large quasi-spherical
cavity with a reasonably well defined lower boundary. This lower
boundary was surrounded by roughly a meter of plastically de-
formed rock, which was fractured at more or less regular intervals.
But, outside of this meter or so, the statements are that the rock
displacement seems to be dominated by generalized block motions,
by motions that occurred along faults, bedding planes, joints;
weaknesses in the rock of one sort or another. Now, that observa-
tion was made, and was well documented - - there are photographs,
there are sketches, there are the clear words.
We can set that next to the comments that have been often
made by Joe LaComb and others, that inside of something like two
cavity radii you really can't make sense out of the displacements.
Things move around in an unpredictable way. For instance, on
Tom-Midnight Zephyr, which was a relatively low yield shot fired in
Area 12, there was a reentry hole drilled from the tunnel back
towards Tom through a region of displaced tuff. If you look at the
configuration, and you expand the cavity, displace the rock as the
naive picture would displace that rock, the reentry hole, RE # 1 ,
would pass from the tunnel to the working point through displaced
tuff.
What was observed? Rubber, steel, electric cable, grout, tuff;
little bits and pieces of all kinds of things. There was not spherical
displacement, or quasi-spherical displacement. This is an example
in the relatively recent history of the same thing that was pointed
out concerning the displacements that were seen at Rainier. Now
Rainier was very much simpler, being a shot with no line of sight,
and no stemming in the way tunnels are currently stemmed.
The community has known this now for thirty years, and I feel
that we haven't drawn the obvious conclusion from it. The
conclusion is that our first-order model of what happens after an
explosion, which is based on the assumption that a one-dimensional
spherical picture is an acceptable, a correct first approximation to
what goes on, is simply not correct. As we do more complex things,
as we worry about layering, or as we do Iine-of-sight experiments in
tunnels, or things of that sort, then we go to axi-symmetric
calculations. We try to treat the wave reflections from interfaces,
we look at the collapse of tunnels, and the interactions with Iine-of-
sight pipes, and things of that kind. This is all based on an extension
of our belief that the first-order approximation of one-dimensional
spherical motion is at least a place to start.
Out of this basic assumption comes our concept of the residual
stress field. We say the explosion occurs, the cavity forms, the rock
is forced out, there is plastic distortion. There is then elastic
rebound, which compresses the rock, builds up a residual stress
field, and "Voila!" We have the intellectual explanation for the
"mystical magical membrane" that people used to talk about before
the 1973 or 1974 time frame, when the residual stress concept was
widely taken to be the basis for containment.
Carothers: Would it be fair to say that this assumption of a
spherically symmetric cavity growth is based on the idea that the
amount of deposited energy is so large, is deposited so fast, and the
shocks that develop are so strong that within that region you're
talking about it doesn't really matter what's there? That it
overwhelms the material properties, and it doesn't matter whether
it's tuff or alluvium or granite or whatever? Is that the basis of this
approximation, do you think?
Duff: Well, that may be the basis of it, and that is what was
observed at Rainier, but that approximation seems to apply only for
one meter past the cavity boundary- - not for the region over which
we think the residual stress field sets up and is effective.
Carothers: Which you take to be between one and two cavity
radii?
Duff: Yes. So, I think what we have done, and I'm saying DNA
now because DNA is the only testing organization which has made
a practice of trying to measure rock properties and strengths in
detail, is we've taken cores of the rock, and we have protected that
core as well as we can. We have then sent it to the laboratory,
primarily to Terra Tek, and they have developed good and presum-
ably reliable techniques to measure the mechanical properties of
that rock. And we have used those measured properties as input to
material models, which then go into the code, and the continuum
mechanics calculational procedures then give us predictions of
stresses, velocities, displacements, and ultimately, residual stresses;
all the observables and calculated parameters of interest.
I believe, however, that if nature tells us that the displacement

for a major part of the overall phenomenon that we're looking at is
not quasi-one dimensional, but is governed by the motion of more
or less arbitrary blocks of rock, the predictions we get from a one-
dimensional model may not be correct.
Now, I want to qualify that in the following sense. The
explosion of a nuclear device does give rise to a very large energy
release, and it gives rise to very high pressures. These pressures are
going to send shock waves out, the shock waves are going to make
material motions to generate particle displacements, particle veloci-
ties, and they will compress rock just as the one-dimensional
argument says. But, if a material is free, or if a material chooses to
deform in a non-radial way by slipping along joints or faults or
bedding planes, then the overall response will be, or may be,
intrinsically different than what we have accepted as intellectually
satisfying. In other words, I'm arguing that the residual stress
concept, which comes out of the one-dimensional simple picture,
may be one of those constructs which seems consistent with the
understanding, which is intellectually very satisfying, which meets
the needs of the community, and which is flat wrong.
Carothers: I thought DNA people had made post-shot mea-
surements in the tunnels, and that they had found evidence of
residual stresses.
Duff: They have not found residual stress. The DNA efforts
to measure residual stresses have come in two areas, basically. One
of them has been reentry hydrofracs. They will decide that they're
going to run a reentry tunnel between the work drift and the main
drift on a particular shot. Usually before DNA runs a tunnel they
do an exploratory boring to make sure that there's nothing ahead
of them that would cause some particular concern. So, they'll have
a drill hole that goes from some place near the end of stemming to
the cavity boundary, or the cavity vicinity. After they've finished
the reconnaissance in that hole they sometimes will hydrofrac it.
They set a pair of packers in two places and pump in, let's say, blue
dyed water. Then as they mine back, when they reenter this area
they can see that the blue fractures go some direction, and some
distance. From this they can get the directions of the fractures, and
from the measurements of the hydrofracing pressures, they get an
idea of the stress states that existed at the time.
Some of the experiments have shown directions of fracturing

which are consistent with the expectation, or prediction, of a
residual stress field. Inside of a particular radius the fractures are
perpendicular to the hole, and outside they are parallel with the
hole, or vice versa. But the magnitudes have, I think, routinely been
comparable to or less than the magnitude of pressure required to
break the rock before there was a shot. So, there is only at most a
very small stress increase, but sometimes there is evidence that the
directions are right.
Also there have been some efforts to install hydrofracing
instruments. Typically this is a hose, or a pipe of some sort, at the
end of which they put what has been described as a rebar nest. That
is a whole bunch of rebars welded together, jammed in the end of
a hole and grouted in. One can then hydrofrac this area with red
dye, measuring the pressures. After the shot, and hopefully very
soon after the shot, one will pump in blue dye and try to frac the
rock again. Then when you reenter you compare the directions of
the red fractures with the directions of the blue fractures. And you
compare the pressure measurements as indications of the stress
states. I don't think these techniques have worked very well - - the
pressure lines break when the shot is fired, or something happens to
the equipment.
There is a third system which is described as the zero moving
parts system. This is equipment developed by Terra Tek, in which
there is a high pressure vessel connected to a scratch gauge which
indicates pressure. When the ground shock comes along, this high
pressure vessel is opened, and a colored fluid is injected into the
rock. The scratch gauge indicates the pressure history in the fluid.
No electronics, no moving parts except the fluid runs out, and that's
it.
That has provided data from at least one experiment. The
evidence from the one case where it did work, that I heard about,
is surprising because the indicated stress, at basically zero time and
immediately after, was lower than pre-shot.
Carothers: Well, we know that can't be so.
Duff: No, I don't know we know that can't be so. The
measurement is not consistent with the expectation of a residual
stress, but you can argue that well, after all this was only the first
time the equipment apparently worked. Maybe it didn't work,
maybe there was some bug somewhere - - so try it again. Maybe they
have tried it again; I don't know. I think that when it comes to
measuring residual stresses in a nuclear environment, we haven't
done it. There are a lot of technical reasons why it's hard to do.
In the nuclear case, the early cases, when there were indica-
tions of low stresses, people said, "We didn't get around to
reentering and drilling this hole and doing the hydrofrac until three,
four, five, six months after the shot. Maybe the stress has just leaked
away. But it must have been there earlier." Some of the other
experiments, like the zero moving parts measurement by Terra Tek,
suggest maybe there isn't any in the first place.
They have found some evidence that the directions of fractures
are what one would expect based on the predictions, but they
haven't found strong stress fields. Now, one can argue, "Oh, they
have decayed away." That might be true.
Carothers: There were tests done at SRI - - small amounts of
HE detonated in concrete blocks - - and residual stress fields were
found.
Duff: Those were the grout-spheres tests at SRI. I think in that
case we may have been misled by experiments which were modeling
a real world, but the models were too good, in a sense. The grouts
as poured were sufficiently homogeneous that the assumptions of
the one-dimensional model were in fact reasonably valid for those
experiments.
The measurement technique which was used in those tests
consisted of circumferential copper wires cast into grout spheres.
The sphere was then placed in a magnetic field, such that as the
cavity was formed, and as the grout moved radially outward, the
wires cut the magnetic field and generated a voltage; this voltage
was proportional to the velocity of the wire. The diagnostics
worked, and that in itself tells us the motion was reasonably
uniform. It was not dominated by block displacements, which
would have sheared the wires. That is a major diagnostic problem
in the nuclear area; it's very difficult to get cable survival, which is
why it has been difficult to get cavity pressures or cavity gas samples
on a routine basis. The conclusion I've come to is that we have
measured residual stresses in the grout spheres experiments, where
we're dealing with a homogeneous, well-behaved material. And

they seem to be strong. But they go away quite quickly, through
some diffusion or creep process.
1 think any time that nature responds as the one-dimensional
calculations suggest that it should respond, we will in fact get all of
the results of the one-dimensional calculations - - the residual stress
field and all the other things that go with it. My point is we that have
had, in the books, the results of the very careful work that Livermore
had the opportunity, and the skill, to do on Rainier. And all of us
have heard Joe LaComb and others talk about the difficulties of
understanding displacements within a couple of cavity radii of an
explosion. I don't think we have drawn the appropriate conclusion
from the information we have. And that conclusion, as far as I'm
concerned, is that the assumptions we've made about how the world
is going to respond do not lead to the way the world does respond.
Therefore, the conclusions that we draw from our assumed response
prediction may not be correct.
I think there is some residual stress field, because there is some
plastic distortion. There is an elastic rebound, but I doubt if the
residual stress field is of the magnitude that we predict, is in the
locations that we predict, or that it sets up at the time that we
predict. It's some result of the distortions and the displacements
which actually occur, but not those that we assume based on the
simple one-dimensional models.
Carothers: Let's see if you would agree with this. The
calculations are fine, and they predict the right phenomenology, but
for a world we don't have. If we're going to believe, or base our
actions on this kind of a model we could be wrong. You might go
on further and say that there are a few cases where we have been
wrong for reasons that we have not yet explained, and the model
does not give an explanation.
Duff: Precisely. I think that's well stated.
Let's look at some other bits of evidence. Cavity radius. I'm
not talking about whether the cavity is oblate, or prolate, or
spherized. We have a constant factor, called the K-factor, that is
used in every presentation as a measure of the expected cavity size.
And we find that 70 is a remarkably good empirical scaling constant
for cavity size at NTS.
Carothers: Well, plus or minus twenty percent.

Duff: There is some spread. From eighty to sixty would get
ninety percent of the cavities. Now, if you were to go to the person
doing the calculations and say, "I have this rock. It is a lava from
Area 19, and it is a pretty good basaltic material. We took it over
to Terra Tek, and they said it was hard, tough, strong. Okay, Mr.
Calculator put that into your code and tell me what the cavity
dimension is going to be."
While he's doing that, somebody from Los Alamos brings in a
core taken from the Sandpile alluvium. And with some effort Terra
Tek will, in fact, come up with a strength for that. You give that to
Mr. Calculator and say, "Tell me how big the cavity should be."
Carothers: About the same size?
Duff: No way.
Carothers: Well, that's what we see.
Duff: Sure. But that's not what we calculate.
Carothers: Well, that's Mr. Calculator's fault, isn't it?
Duff: Is it, Jim? Is it his fault, or is it the fact that the
containment community, of which I am one, and my hand is up as
guilty, has had it's head in the proverbial sand, like an ostrich, and
has been ignoring the data?
My point is, we can't calculate even something so simple. The
concepts that we think apply, namely that the material properties
as measured in the laboratory, and fed into the material models that
we want to use, give the right answers, don't. They don't give
answers which are in good agreement with our observations. There
are two things we can do about that. One of them is we could say
we didn't calculate it right. Another one is, we could wonder if our
model is wrong. Maybe we're not thinking about the problem right.
What I'm suggesting for consideration here is that we're not
thinking about it right.
And I have a piece of evidence. Let's consider Pile Driver.
That was an experiment done in granite. The strength of that
granite, measured in the usual Terra Tek or Livermore manner, I
think turned out to be eighty kilobars. It is an extremely strong,
competent rock. You put that into a code like TENSOR at
Livermore, or TOODY, or STAR at Pac Tech, or CRAM here, or
SKIPPER here, and you get a very small cavity radius. And you get
a number of other observables related to stresses and velocities.
You get certain predictions. Then you ask, "What is the data?" The
data is quite different.
Norton Rimer is one person who has had reasonable success
trying to Fit a material model to the Pile Driver experience, from first
principles. He started with an explosion in a rock whose properties
he defined, and made sure that he got the particle velocities and the
stresses that were measured. In order to do that he had to use what
he called an effective stress model. In other words, he said, "The
strength of the rock is not even to a first approximation what Terra
Tek measured." Its strength is related to the fluid pressures which
you generate in the little fractures. The point is, it was the
inhomogeneities in the rock, and not the rock itself, which were
central to an effective description. Effective means we had a model
which at least agreed with the observations. The straightforward
calculation that we would make the way DNA, or Los Alamos, or
Livermore ordinarily treats the problem doesn't come close. The
code is probably okay; that's just F = ma, usually. And if one has
done his job right on certain test problems you can believe that F
= ma, and the code is computing that.
But I want to emphasize this point again in connection with the
cavity radius observations. I think we are dealing with a situation
where the response of the ground to the explosion is dominated by
interface slipping characteristics. And, the interface characteristics
are likely to be quite different from the apparent characteristics of
intact rock. It is not inconceivable to me that the interfaces in hard
rock can slip more or less as easily as interfaces can in alluvium. This
leads me to question the prediction, the expectation, of a residual
stress which comes from simple continuum mechanics codes. There
the intrinsic assumption is that material points which start out close
together will end up close together.
This assumption leads to a whole bunch of conclusions, residual
stress being one of them. If the essential phenomena are governed
by motions which don't satisfy the fundamental continuum mechan-
ics assumption, then I don't think that as technical people we are
justified in expecting the predictions of continuum mechanics to
apply.
The Residual Stress Cage 31]
What this leads me to is a real question of whether the very

convenient, very comfortable, appealing, residual stress concept,
which we've all talked about for the last eighteen years, is more than
a crutch; more than a construct which is convenient, but which may
be quite irrelevant to our real problem. Now, I don't know that the
conventional wisdom is wrong. I am saying there's a body of
evidence that leads me to question it.
For the last several years there has been a damage failure
surface which goes into the DNA calculations. A rock is assumed
to be damaged by the shock process, and its strength after shock
passage is less than it was before.
Carothers: How damaged unspecified, but damaged in some
way?
Duff: Yes. If you take a rock to Terra Tek and you squeeze it,
release it, and then you squeeze it again, it will show less strength
than it showed the first time. It has been damaged in some way. We
have modeled that kind of effect. The models that are used by the
DNA community at the present time relate weakness to stress level.
In other words, if you stress a rock to four kilobars, its strength is
reduced by, say, thirty percent. If you go to six kilobars, it's forty
percent. A stress related damage criterion is used in the code, and
that fits the experimental data that comes out of the laboratory. It
doesn't fit the experimental data which you would derive from core
recovered after a shot.
That core is weaker than would be expected, on the basis of the
existing damage models. Norton Rimer and Bill Proffer have been
doing some material modeling work, and Norton has looked at a
different way of describing damage. Instead of using a stress related
criteria, he's using a strain related criteria. If you distort rock five
percent, to make up some numbers, say the strength goes down ten
percent. If you distort it twenty percent, the strength comes down
more. He has developed a model, which is very preliminary, in
which the model parameters chosen for the calculations were fitted
to give the same results along a laboratory uniaxial strain load to
four kilobars, and a biaxial strain unload as in the earlier damage
models.
In other words, he and Bill treat the Terra Tek data in the same
way. However, the two models give grossly different results on
laboratory paths to peak stresses to eight kilobars. The newer strain
dependent model has the additional feature of approximating

laboratory test data on post-shot damaged samples, whereas the
earlier models did not. All of the parameters for the calculations
consist of a single set of shear-strain parameters, and a range of
damaged strengths varying from mush, for close-in, highly strained
material - - which is consistent with the measurements - - to
approximately one-half the virgin strengths. The results of the
calculations show a later rebound, longer duration of rebound, and
a residual stress state which Norton characterizes as marginal for
preventing cavity gases from moving significant distances from the
cavity. The calculated residual stress field has lower peaks at
considerably greater ranges, and in fact, there are multiple residual
stress peaks that come out of these calculations.
The residual stress concept, as we've thought about it, is based
on relatively simple models of material response. Either the
material is just strong- - it's elastic-plastic material, and does things
as an elastic-plastic material does - - or it is a material which degrades
in its performance it a particular way based on the stress levels
reached. And, we have gone from these calculations to an intellec-
tual construct, which gives us a framework in which to evaluate
containment. Norton is saying, "If I look at exactly the same
laboratory data in a different way, and certainly there is no a-priori
basis for saying a stress criterion is better than a strain criterion for
describing the onset of damage, I get qualitatively different an-
swers."
Carothers: Tom, for years people have lived with the residual
stress cage concept as a measure of goodness, if you like, when
calculations are presented. I have had difficulty finding anyone who
would say there was good experimental evidence for this residual
stress, this "containment cage," in the Field.
Kunkle: I have discussed this with Fred App at some length,
and he is one of the principal modelers of residual stress fields
around nuclear events. Indeed, he would very much like to have a
stress profile, or a pressure sensor record to work with. The trouble
is that the stress cage occurs in regions of intense groundshock;
scaled ranges of maybe twenty scaled meters, and we don't have
equipment that normally survives there. Livermore has fielded
some experiments in an attempt to look for the residual stress, and
I don't believe they've ever had a gauge survive and return
unambiguous pressure measurements that could be interpreted in

terms of residual stress. So, it's a theoretical concept that we've
never been able to validate, but we don't have, to my knowledge,
any experimental data that would say it's incorrect. A major factor
in containment research throughout the underground test program
is what is the nature of the so-called "magic membrane" that keeps
all the gas inside the cavity, or nearby the cavity.
Carothers: John, did your early SOC calculations show a
residual stress field around the cavity?
Rambo: Our calculations did show that rebound phase, but
because it was a spherical calculation it was constantly bouncing.
The wave would go up to the surface and come back down, and then
go back up again. But, by and large you could see some differences
in residual stress if you had different strengths in there. So, it was
kind of good enough to roughly characterize those things, and if you
did have a big reflection coming in from the surface, or the edge of
a layer that was close in, which was also spherical, sometimes that
would make a difference in what you saw, even in a spherical sense.
And we thought, "Well, you know, it's kind of conservative
because these reflections come back rather strongly, and if you can
survive it as a sphere, then maybe you can survive it in a real
situation where the layers are flat and not reflecting quite so
strongly." That was the logic behind how we started in that area,
and we did do a lot of calculations which we got up in front of the
CEP and presented, showing these things.
Carothers: There are people who say there is no experimental
evidence that we have, that shows a rebound and a stress cage on
an actual shot. Maybe you do get stress fields over here, but they
might be bigger than you calculate, and over there they might be
smaller, or non-existent, because of the various beds, and layers,
and faults, and blocks, and so on. Could you comment on that?
Rambo: You said we've never measured a residual stress, and
I say, "Well, is that because we haven't been able to measure it
effectively, or is it that the measurements that did take place didn't
show anything?"
Carothers: Well, rarely do you look. When you do, the

instruments don't survive. Or it's been a long time later, and that
stress field has decayed. It is, in fact, a very difficult experimental
problem.
Rambo: There was some data from Orkney, a Livermore shot
up in area 10. This event did have gauges that would supposedly
measure the hoop stress and the radial stress, in two different
locations, and the instruments survived. In fact, you could probably
run them today if you wanted to. I ran a 1-D calculation to see if
I got anything that looked like what they measured. The calculation
that I did, going through my normal procedure of guessing things
about the material properties, showed residual stress. The gauges
also showed what looked like a residual stress, but not to the degree
I calculated it. The timing was about right, but the magnitude of it
seemed to be less than I calculated. I think that what's happening
out in the real world is that there may not be as much residual stress
as I calculate.
You can get into arguments about, "Well, was that real data,
or are there other things that went on?" That argument goes for
almost everything we've measured in the field. My point is, maybe
what I'm doing isn't completely erroneous. Over the years I've
come to put a lot of faith in the shear strength in my models, as being
part of what takes place in terms of this rebound, and how good it
is and how good it isn't. In looking at a lot of the logs, where I've
tried to divine the shear strength from looking at the velocity logs,
I get a feel that the shear strength varys all over the place. It's one
of those things that comes and goes, and comes and goes. You can
look at density logs and they don't look the same as what we might
be experiencing terms of shear strength.
What I think is out there is not homogeneous, and I agree with
that completely. I think that there are areas where the residual
stress may look a lot better than in other areas. It may have a lot
to do with why you get cavities that are not spherical, and why you
may go in one direction, even horizontally, or off to one particular
side, and you don't see the things that you see in a calculation. And
that's because of the limited amount of information I have, to do
what 1 have to do in terms of averaging properties and organizing the
materials. I'm looking for generic effects when I do these things,
and weaknesses. But I have to also say that there are some cases
where we've modeled a generic weakness, and we may have seen the
same thing in the field. I say, "may", because the statistics are very
poor.
There are things like Baneberry, which we modeled, that didn't
show residual stress. There was a lot of evidence that it didn't have
anything like that. For instance, it leaked out of the ground. More
recently there was the Barnwell event, which looked calculationally
like it had residual stress problems. And after the shot there was
radiation high in the stemming. There was Nash, which I did run
some calculations on and compared to the Bourbon event. Nash
looked worse than Bourbon, and Nash leaked but Bourbon con-
tained. That is probably the only evidence of things actually having
happened that I calculated.
The statistics are very poor. There have been cases where I've
calculated things that showed residual stress, and they leaked, or
had some difficulties. And there have been some cases where I did
a calculation which showed that didn't have any residual stress, and
they contained just fine. But there's one thread that seems to
wander through these calculations of residual stress, although the
statistics, as I said earlier, are terrible. That is, there's usually
something else wrong with the event besides the residual stress. On
Baneberry there was lots clay and lots of water. On Barnwell there
was also quite a bit of water. On Nash there was a lot of C02, a
non-condensable gas. Those things may play a factor, if you know
you haven't got any residual stress, it may be a secondary thing that
is really important. To draw a conclusion out of three or four events
like that is a very poor style, but nevertheless in this business, I keep
looking for a thread.
Carothers: Russ Duff has said that the calculations are not
wrong, but the world in which you work is not the kind of world that
the calculations calculate. That's the business of the inhomogene-
ities, the layers of different rocks, the three dimensionality, possibly
block motions. If you only had the right kind of world, the
calculations would be just fine, but you're applying them to a world
that doesn't exist.
Rambo: I would like to temper that comment a bit. There are
some areas where the non-homogeneities are more apparent than
others. Take the tunnels, where you're in stronger rock, and there
are lots of fracture planes. They have indeed seen motion along
these planes, and the calculators that I talk with say, "We just can't
model that sort of thing yet. Or maybe we will never be able to
model that kind of thing." Those fracture planes may play a strong
role in what eventually ends up as the non-residual stress, or the
residual stress being taken away. But as you get down to the Flat,
the differences in the strength are not quite as different. In the Flat
we're talking about more of a soil type of material, but still there are
those areas that have hard rocks and porous materials.
My experience is in looking at drilling rates. In the Flat, drilling
tends to go fairly quickly through most of the tuffs - - not all of them,
but most of them. I get a different impression from that than what
I see up on the Mesa, in looking at the strengths that are measured
in the tunnels. It's just a bias that I've picked up over the years, in
looking at, and becoming more aware of what's happening in the
tunnels. A calculator tends to look at things a little bit differently,
because he's looking for, or trying to divine, properties that have to
do with containment, or those he thinks have to do with containment.
Another answer to this question about residual stress is that
many of the people who say there isn't anything such as residual
stress are talking about shots in the tunnels. That's the discussion
that seems to be going on now. One of the things that has come
through this whole business is that, in the lore, low yield events have
more trouble containing than high yield events. And, the people in
the tunnels are always shooting in a subkiloton to maybe less than
two kilotons range, for the most part. They have done ten kilotons
shots, but the low yield events seem to be showing most of the
residual stress problems. Or, most of the events where they've
leaked radioactivity have been in the low yield range.
To a first degree I try to put layers in the model at different
strengths, but there may be things that we don't know are there, or
cracks, or the strength properties we may think are all one strength
may not be. My argument is that you see more of this kind of thing
in the tunnels than you do out in the Flat. My feeling is you ought
to see it where you have relatively high strength rock with cracks,
and with lots of weakness around the shot point. Those things are
going to move, and they do move; in the tunnels they can see that
they have.
Although we can hit those kinds of things occasionally in the

Flat, I believe we're in more of a soil-like material where the
difference in strengths between the material and the fracture zones
is less. So, the block motion is not going to be quite so strong.
Carothers: How long do you think the residual stress stays
there?
Rambo: In looking at Billy Hudson's cavity pressure measure-
ments, that pressure seems to decay rather quickly for a half minute
or a minute. Then it seems to decay very slowly. I'm saying you
can only have cavity pressure if there's something there to hold it,
so I'm making an association between the cavity pressure that's
sitting there, and some sort of residual stress that holds it in. Your
question hasn't got an easy answer to it.
Carothers: What mechanism would you hypothesize that
would allow or cause a relaxation of the residual stress?
Rambo: I think there could be constant readjusting. First of
all, the cavity pressure is likely to decay away because there are
cracks and porosity for the gases to go through. As this happens I
think the pressure against the cavity walls becomes less, and the
materials start to rearrange themselves in terms of stress fields. You
hear this in the geophone record as a constant rumbling that's goes
on after the shot, before collapse takes place. I think the cooling
can even bring some of the cavity gases into condensing to the point
where the cavity is at less than atmospheric pressure, and that has
certainly been noticed on some shots.
I think this relieving mechanism is just the normal part of the
collapse process that's taking place. I don't understand it very well;
I can understand how you can get pressure decaying, and causing
some of that. What happens after that is just mysterious in my mind,
because I've never heard any explanation of it. It has to do with
things like what's the strength of various blocks, and this, that, and
the other thing. It's the mysterious part of this business, that we
have no knowledge of, that sometimes has a lot to do with the
success or failure of a shot. That was Agrini and Riola. There are
mechanisms out there that have nothing to do with residual stress
or what's in the cavity, and that is the risk factor which we can't do
much about that goes along with a shot.
Carothers: Mr Rimer, from things you have said, I take it that

you believe in the residual stress field.
Rimer: I believe in it for relatively homogeneous materials.
The problem is, on nuclear events, we have never successfully
measured residual compressive hoop stresses. There are one or two
measurements where we put the gauge side-on, and we've gotten
records that last a long time. There are funny things that I've seen
when you compare those records to a radial stress record at the same
location.
On small scale experiments, like the SRI grout spheres, we've
actually seen the effects of residual stress. There was a tube in those
spheres that was to connect to the cavity after the explosion, so we
could hydrofracture from the cavity. Well, once there was a break
in the tube, and instead of going all the way to the cavity, it broke
somewhere in between. When we pumped in that dyed fluid, it went
all around the cavity, right where the dip in the residual stress field
was supposed to be. Itdidn't go into the cavity. It found the easiest
path, and that's where it went.
On HE tests Carl Smith has measured very long time stresses.
Unfortunately, these are the radial ones, the ones that don't matter
too much. We need the hoop sresses. It is a strong containment
diagnostics goal of DNA to try to measure these residual stresses.
Bass: You're not liable to see residual stress show up on a radial
stress gauge, and that's where all the measurements are made to try
to find it. You can see it on a hoop stress gauge if the hoop stress
gauge lasts long enough. Those measurements have not been very
successful, and they are too far out.
Carothers: A criticism I have heard of those measurements is,
"Convince me that you're measuring stress and not strain."
Bass: I won't argue that point at all. Especially when you get
down to the range where you can make the measurement. When
you get below the shear strength of the tuff, which is three-tenths
of a kilobar, I don't know what's going on, and I don't know what
we're measuring. I think we're measuring the pressure component,
rather than a stress component when we get below three-tenths of
a kilobar. And we've got a lot of information saying that's the case,
because the curve bends off the wrong way when you make those
measurements. This falloff steepens when you get below three-
tenths of a kilobar. In my compilations of data, which are used sort

of as the bible of what ground shock exists where, I say don't draw
the line below twice the strength of material, because we don't know
what we're doing in that region. We just flat don't know.
Rimer: On Misty Echo and Mission Ghost we, preshot,
hydrofractured the rock to get the in-situ stresses. Then post-shot
we hydrofractured it again. Observations in G tunnel by Carl Smith
on HE events showed that the directions of the minimum stresses are
oriented differently post-shot than they were pre-shot. That change
remains for many months; the magnitudes of the stresses don't
remain, but the directions do. We found a change in direction on
Mission Ghost. The magnitudes though, where we predict two
hundred bars, they were sixty bars, but they were in the right spot.
The directions were changed, and the largest changes we measured
with the post-shot hydrofractures were near where the largest
residual stresses were supposed to be.
Carothers: People have talked about the residual stress as
unloading, or relaxing, either due to migration of water out of the
pores, or due to creep, but they don't talk about very long time
scales. Certainly not months.
Rimer: Minutes. We have tried to calculate this. Pac Tech has
used the standard creep model, with data from lab tests at Terra Tek
on tuffs. We've tried that way, and we've also tried with a pore fluid
migration model, with detailed effective stress concepts. It's
difficult; we can make those codes do almost anything, because we
haven't tied down the material properties, the models of the rock,
especially after a ground shock has passed through. We can't give,
from those calculations, a precise time frame for it, but I would say
it's minutes. Because we don't know how to tie the calculations
down, on every event we're still trying to measure residual stress.
But I would say that stress field relaxes in minutes.
Carothers: It's hard to believe that in minutes there would be
enough fluid migration to do very much. The permeability is rather
low, the pressure gradients aren't all that high, and the fluid has to
move a fair distance. The residual stress field, if it does exist, isn't
as thin as a foot.
Rimer: No. It depends on the yield of the device, but it's in

the range of many meters. But that's another thing we don't know
- - how far the fluid has to move to relieve these stresses.
Carothers: Dan, let me make a summary statement that I think
represents what a number of people have said about residual stress
calculations. People who calculate shocks going out, and so on, are
using the right physics, and their codes are okay, and the calcula-
tions are fine. However, when they do that they're always assuming
a homogeneous medium. When you look at the grout sphere
experiments, or the work that Carl Smith did - - Carl searched
around in G tunnel for homogeneous blocks in which to do his
experiments - - those are homogeneous media. Unfortunately, the
world isn't like that. There are layers, and cracks, and fractures, and
so you don't actually know what the material properties are, on the
scale that you're going to be calculating.
Patch: Sure. One of the problems is basically what you're
referring to, which is the geostructure - - fractures, and bedding
planes, and all that stuff.
It would be surprising if you didn't run into some perturbation
of this so-called stress field that's formed around the cavity. One
of the problems that we certainly have is that we don't have a direct
measurement of it. We've been trying and trying to get a direct
.measure of the residual stress field - - what the stress state is, after
the shot is over, for a real shot in a real medium, in more than one
place. That is certainly a very high priority goal in the DNA
containment diagnostic program.
Carothers: And that's a measurement that is very hard to do.
Patch: Yes, very hard to do. The second thing that has given
us a great deal of concern is the time dependence of this stress state.
We think we know when it sets up. We're pretty uncertain,
unfortunately, what its actual magnitude is, and surely don't know
when it goes away. There seems to be a body of evidence that
suggests it can go away pretty darn quickly.
Terra Tek did some work back probably in the mid-eighties,
trying to simulate creep for loaded tuffs. It was an outgrowth of
these questions and issues that came out of the SRI program. When
SRI fired these little shots, and then subsequently fractured them,
it made a difference when they fractured the cavity. If they did it
very quickly, they found very high fracture resistances. It took

measured pressures as high as five or six thousand psi in trying to
break out of those little explosively formed cavities. That seemed
to be pretty strong evidence of a residual stress field, since the
spheres would only hold about fifteen hundred if you just fractured
a natural cavity. But if you waited, the fracture pressure that the
cavity could hold dropped with time, and it dropped very quickly.
A matter of half a minute made a difference - - it might bring it from
six thousand down to two thousand or so.
Carothers: What do you think causes that to happen?
Patch: There are two schools of thought. One is that it's
basically the pore fluid migrating down the pressure gradient.
Conceptually, oversimplifying, it carries the stress with it. The fluid
flows, and it's under the highest pressure where the stress is the
highest, and it goes away, relieving the stress. And that kind of
mechanism scales. The bigger the shot the longer the time it takes;
it all scales as the cube root of the yield.
The other possibility is that it's creep, or a stress relaxation
mechanism of a semi-classical type; a material that is loaded has a
stress difference on it, and it tries to flow in a quasi-plastic kind of
way. That, in some sense, is a point property, and it's independent
on the size of the medium. And so, these two mechanisms, in terms
of their time dependence, are very different. The implication is that
for a nuclear shot, if the stress field were flowing out as a pore fluid
effect, it would take a very long period of time, because you're
trying to migrate fluid down what is a shallow gradient in terms of
psi per foot, and you have to move a lot of water. The other
mechanism is independent of that. It just tries to equilibrate stress
differences. Each little microelement of the material, if you will, is
unhappy and readjusts it's grains, or whatever it wants to do to
accommodate that.
I have been more of the creep mechanism school, myself. The
reason, as much as any is that some folks who are smarter than 1 took
a look at what would happen if you took an stressed material, and
had the pore fluid flow out of it. Unfortunately, the stress is not like
colored dye, and the psi's don't flow with the fluid. What happens
is that the material tends to transfer the load; part of it comes out
with the fluid, and part of it is taken up by the matrix of the material.
And then the issue was, does it take up a lot of it, or a little of it.
My recollection is that it didn't really cancel out very well.
Ristvet: If we believe some of our recent DNA data, yes, we
have residual stress, but it's very small. I think some of the
measurements we made on the last three events kind of suggest that
yes, the residual stress is there, but the magnitude is less than the
cavity pressure. What's interesting is we are now calculating those
small numbers using a discrete element code that allows certain
block motions to occur.
We're getting almost to the point where we can make some
measurements. We're finally getting smart enough about how to
make the measurements, after twenty some events where we failed.
And everybody knew what the problem was; it's called cable
survivability. So we went out and made the hardest cables we could,
and I give credit to SRI, and in part to Carl Keller who modified SRl's
design, and then to Sandia who even made it better. What they have
developed is this wire rope wrapped cable. In the tuff or alluvium
I think it will work just great, because it can cut through the medium,
in a sense, because it is so rigid in comparison, and yet it can protect
the soft conductors inside.
Carothers: Norton Rimer has said that as far as he was
concerned the best location for testing a device was in a weak rock.
If you have a strong rock, like granite, you will get a small cavity,
high pressure, and a lot of tensile fractures. He said he liked a nice
soft, forgiving rock.
App: Same here. I believe that. Our current models of the
ashflow tuffs at the Nevada Test Site suggest that you get a stronger
residual stress field in them than in other rocks. For example, you
don't get a lot of tensile failure. The failure is predominately shear
failure; the material is not physically pulling apart. Also there is a
lot of rebound for the formation of a residual stress field.
Calculationally, the residual stress is stronger than you get for a
weaker material like alluvium, or for a denser material like welded
tuff or lava. I think what Norton said is right.
Lava is strong in shear, and it is always jointed. You're not
going to find many rocks that are not jointed. The shear strength
might be quite high, but the effective tensile strength is zero; during
the outward cavity growth the cracks open up. During rebound they
close down again, but during that hysteresis period when the cracks
are opening and closing the mechanism isn't there to create a
residual stress field, because residual stress formation depends on
shear failure.
When the material is failing in shear, as soon as the rebound
starts you immediately start forming the compressive, elastic stresses
that comprise the residual stress field. So, there's a very basic
phenomenological difference between a strong rock and what I will
call a medium strength rock such as ashflow tuff. On the other hand,
when you go to a very weak rock, like a Baneberry clay, there's not
enough strength to support any kind of shear, or residual stress.
If you make a plot of calculated peak residual stress versus
strength of the rock, it starts out very low, increases with increasing
strength, hits a peak, and then decreases with increasing strength.
The way the models are currently set up, it appears that the ashflow
tuffs are almost ideal for the formation of a strong residual stress
field. The fact that the alluvium is very weak doesn't matter that
much because the water table is below it, so it's dry, and there is a
lot of volume to take up the gases, even if it doesn't form much of
a residual stress cage.
325
12
Hydrofractures
As discussed in the preceding chapter, what might be called the

conventional view, and the conventional calculations assume a
homogeneous medium,. Energy is deposited in that medium, and
there is a spherical shockwave that goes out. The properties of the
medium lead to a rebound of the material, and to the formation
around the cavity of a stressed region which is called the residual
stress cage, or containment cage. The stress in the rocks in that
region is high enough that the pressure in the cavity cannot drive gas
or fractures through it. In this view, the residual stress is an
important phenomenon in containing the gases produced by the
explosion.
There is another view, which might be expressed as follows:
there are pieces of evidence which are hard to reconcile with the
conventional model. There might or might not be a stress cage, but
as a matter of fact, such a concept could be a wrong road. The
principal mechanism that accounts for containment could be the
release of cavity pressure through fractures driven from the cavity.
Because of the nature of the material the fractures don't propagate
far enough to reach the surface, although they might through preex-
isting weaknesses such as fractures or cracks. Perhaps the leading
proponent of this view was Russell Duff.
Duff: There is a very considerable body of evidence about
containment mechanisms that has been around for a long time, and
I don't think our community has responded to that evidence in a
responsible scientific fashion, in that the response has not been as
true to the scientific method as we might like to think. There is an
alternative containment concept to the residual stress cage concept,
and that's the work of Griffith and Nilsen on fracture-related
containment mechanisms.
Carothers: At the CEP you have talked about calculations
which indicated fractures go out very quickly, but there's so much
cooling to the walls, and so much pressure needed to drive them,
that at most they only go a hundred meters or so. In this picture
of containment, as I understand it, the hypothetical stress cage has
little to do with it. There are fractures, and as a matter of fact, the
more fractures there are the better it is, because they lead to
cooling, and to a decrease in the pressure in the cavity.
Duff: I can provide a piece of pretty good evidence to support
the fracture argument. Let's talk about Red Hot. This was an event
which occurred in a hemispherical cavity. The yield was relatively
small. We have calculated the expected cavity expansion from this
event, and it's about three or four meters. What's observed is
roughly one meter.
When you have a twenty-three meter start and then you go one
more, or you go three or four more, that is a big relative volume
difference. From 23 meters to 24 meters is a little bit of expansion,
like 12 or 13 percent in volume. From 23 meters to 27 or 28
meters is a lot of expansion, like 60 to 80 percent. What
mechanism can make the cavity not expand? Well, one obvious
thing is that the pressure went away. When would the pressure have
to go away to make the cavity expansion only be one meter instead
of three or four? The answer is five or ten milliseconds. Now, that
is so fast that whatever happened did so inside of any time frame in
which residual stress fields would be set up; that would be more like
a hundred millisecond time frame.
So, how can nature get rid of the pressure from an explosion
in ten milliseconds? Nilsen looked at this problem, and looked at
the fracture system that you might expect from such an explosion
in such a cavity. He used his code called FAST, which is a calculating
system which is related in many ways to analytic treatments. He
came up with an answer that it would require fractures from the
cavity at roughly three meter intervals to dump the pressure.
We reentered Red Hot, and it happened that the reentry drift
intersected a fracture; you can see it in the floor of the reentry drift.
It goes out about fifteen or twenty feet from the cavity boundary
and stops, so it wasn't driven for a very long time, but it was driven
quite energetically. It is a very narrow crack for the last few feet,
but it is quite a large fracture at the cavity boundary. There is a
grapefruit sized hunk of rock in this glass-filled fracture, and that
rock came from some place far away. So, there was at least one
fracture on Red Hot. It didn't go very far, probably because the
pressure didn't last very long. Let's say the pressure didn't last very
long because there was a system of fractures, lots of fractures.
Hydrofractures 327
Nilsen said you could kill the pressure if you had fractures
every three meters. So, Joe LaComb drilled a hole parallel to the
flat face of the cavity, and 1 believe he encountered fourteen
fractures along the length of this hole. On average they were three
meters apart. So, I think that there is a net of at least circumstantial
evidence which says Red Hot was contained because a whole system
of fractures developed and they dumped the pressure on a very fast
time scale.
Ristvet: There was an another hypothesis, which was that the
crater threw a lot of cold debris into the cavity. When we looked
at the crater through the drilling, with the TV cameras, it was almost
exactly as S-Cubed and myself had predicted. I did it empirically,
and S-Cubed did it calculationally. The throwout was very small,
because the high pressures in the cavity just didn't let anything get
thrown out. You have to have extremely high ejection velocities to
move through that overpressure.
That also says something else about the timing, which helped
validate the calculations too. Those high pressures lasted for only
a few tens of miliseconds, and then they dropped very, very fast.
That was probably during the time those short, stubby fractures
formed.
Now, we did see, on Red Hot reentry, two steam type
hydrofracs, the kind with no glass, or very little glass associated with
them. They went up above the Deep Well access drift to the base
of the vitric. They follow the in-situ stress field perfectly. Those
two are not well explained. They had to occur at a very early time,
while the pressure was still up, and probably the other fracs were still
forming. And maybe they continued to grow during the dynamic
phases of the tunnel and cavity growth.
Carothers: I have heard that on Red Hot there is a big fracture
that extends a long way, and is wide and open.
Ristvet: Yes, that's also in the Deep Well access drift, where
we saw these two steam-type fractures. Those were observed during
the actual reentry when Bill VoIIendorf and probably Mel Merrit,
because he was the scientific director, or whatever the title was in
those days, on the shot, went back in there. And yes, they could
see this big opening in the top of the Deep Well access drift, filled
with glass. However, the ones we actually mined up to were very
wide, a foot wide or so, but they didn't go anywhere. They only
went three, four, five meters from the cavity. I think the viscosity
of that glass just plugs those things up real quick.
Smith: Well, in addition to those short fractures, there is that
fracture that goes over the top of the drift that went over to Deep
Well. And this is a fracture with radioactivity in it. My predecessor
had them drill down, and my impression is that they traced it down
about thirty feet. When 1 got into the program 1 was still curious
about it, and we drilled a bunch more holes up. It goes up over a
hundred feet from where the tunnel intersects it; we drilled holes
through it, and ran radiation probes through it. So, in addition to
all those short fractures there is this additional one, and I think
people tend to forget about that fracture. They concentrate on
what was found in the DNA work, when they were looking at all the
phenomenology of decoupled and coupled shots.
Carothers: Gary, there were samples of glass found in the

fractures that occured on Ranier. Could you tell, from the
radiochemistry, when those fractures occured?
Higgins: That fracuring was going on within the first two
hundred milliseconds, because the material found in them was from
the cavity itself, like copper, and uranium. Uranium is one of those
elements that, if it has the slightest opportunity, is going to
recombine with any oxygen present. It had done that, but it had
done so locally, sufficient to create F-centers, where it had stripped
away electrons and made a little electron-deficient well around it.
We could see that by x-ray diffraction; we could see islands around
the uranium where it had become uranium oxide at the expense of
all of its good neighbors. It had arrived as a metal, or it wouldn't
have done that, and that record would not have been in the glass.
That glass is bright red, instead of being black, because all of the F-
centers are color-reactive. The bright red color is because the
uranium has made some of the silicon dioxide into silicon monoxide,
which only exists as a gas, or in a glass as a dissolved gas.
Carothers: You say this fracture occurred during the first two
hundred milliseconds. Does that mean it occurred before the
rebound, and perhaps the rebound shut it off?
Hydrofractures 329
Higgins: That's correct. I think there's good evidence, from

the chemistry, and also now in the calculations to indicate that.
During cavity growth, if the cavity gases are at a high enough
pressure, and they are, fractures will occur. The mystical magical
membrane idea occurred because we knew the pressure was high
enough to hydrofract, but it didn't. Well, there's now evidence that
it does hydrofract, and part of the normal rebound process is
pinching those cracks off. I think that in many materials, like in
alluvium, that is also a transient phenomenon, that there is another
outgoing relaxation wave. However, that's a sonic wave, and takes
many, many milliseconds. The stress cage builds up, shuts the
fractures off, and then the stresses relax. By then the pressure and
temperature have gone down to where they are essentially in
equilibrium with their surroundings.
Carothers: Things have to happen in sequence on a pretty fast
time scale to keep you out of trouble in the scenario you describe.
Higgins: Yes, that's exactly right. I believe that pretty fast time
scale means some of our mysterious failures are cases where that
sequence was just a little out of step.
Carothers: From the evidence from Rainier, seeing the frac-
tures and so on, wouldn't one be led to think that hydrofractures
could occur on all shots?"
Higgins: Yes.
Carothers: Now, there are shots which don't release enough
energy to form much of a stress cage, if any. Why don't they
hydrofract to the surface?
Higgins: I think they do hydrofract, and what contains them
is primarily cooling in the fractures. They don't have enough energy
to form a stress cage, and they also don't have enough energy to
drive a fracture; it takes a lot of energy to do that. You can blow
material into the front of the crack, but to get it very far down the
crack is really very difficult. People who have tried to calculate
hydrofracture from a theoretical point of view are always astounded
at how difficult it is to drive a hydrofracture. To initiate a fracture
is very easy. To drive it any considerable distance is a very hard
thing to do.
Carothers: Particularly when there are losses into the walls,

and where you have cooling so you have liquid at the tip of the
crack, which you're trying to push on from the back.
Higgins: Yes. Absolutely. The first thing condensation does,
and I think is the most important thing, although I haven't con-
vinced anyone of it, is to cause the tip of the fracture to cease being
a discontinuity, and become a rounded hemispherical circle. And
that happens fairly fast if you try to drive a fracture with a
condensable liquid. I've often thought it might be fun to try to
simulate such things with a liquid metal driving a fracture into a
cold, solid metal. It's not likely to go very far, because you're going
to get a wad pretty fast.
Keller: When I was at DNA I funded S-Cubed to build a
hydrogen-oxygen torch as a very well controlled high pressure, high
temperature steam source, to use in experiments to validate the
condensable flow codes; the hydrofrac codes. Some experiments
were done in sand-filled pipes to check the porous flow, and some
were done in drill holes in G tunnel and P tunnel. The first two in
G tunnel worked very well. The last experiment in P tunnel was like
the Perils of Pauline. They had trouble, and finally it was a lot of
effort which didn't produce very good data. But the first couple of
experiments have been used numerous times as proof of the models.
Peterson: I and another fellow, and a few other people here,

put together a steam generator that burned hydrogen and oxygen.
With that we did some fracture tests in the very impermeable tuffs
in G tunnel. On the tests we had a bore hole that was drilled in from
the tunnel. What I call the test region, where the steam was being
injected, was a four-inch diameter hole eighteen inches long. We
injected hydrogen and oxygen and burned it in that little section of
the hole. And we also injected water, which turned to steam, to get
the right steam conditions. We were trying to get a steam source
that had characteristics similar to what we thought was in the cavity.
To do that we were running about a thousand degree Centi-
grade steam, and I believe we were running pressures of seven or
eight hundred psi. We could adjust the steam generator to give
whatever we thought we needed for the source conditions. The
energy was tremendous that we were putting in there; we were
Hydrofractures 331
dumping like one or two megawatts into that little hole. To run for
about two minutes required twenty-four big cylinders of hydrogen
and twelve cylinders of oxygen.
We looked at the steam flow, and the fracture propagation.
The main attempt was to try to calibrate the KRAK code, and
validate it. So, we looked at steam fracturing from that source, and
steam flow, and steam condensation. We had numbers of drill holes
that had been drilled in at various distances from the source hole,
and we looked at the fracture tip propagation across those bore
holes, and looked at the pressure rise, and so forth and so on. It was
to get a better idea of fracturing, to see whether the models really
do calculate steam fracturing correctly.
Carothers: When you hydrofracture something you take some
water, or steam, or whatever. You pressurize it. There's a little
discontinuity in the rock, and the rock cracks. The fluid moves
down the crack, transmits the pressure, and the crack extends.
That's my view of hydrofracture.
Peterson: I don't think it's any different than mine. I think it's
been interesting over the last five years to see what we've learned
in terms of fracturing. If we look at fracturing from a cavity, and
we take a standard tamped shot, the only time, in most cases, that
it looks like you can get any fracture from this cavity is during the
time that the cavity is actually growing.
That's the only time that the stress fields are set up in a manner
which allows the pressure in the fracture to be greater than the
confining pressure. If the confining pressure around the fracture is
greater than the pressure inside, the fracture just closes back up. It
won't grow. While the cavity growth is continuing, the Shockwave
is moving out further, and the shock is way ahead of the cavity.
Sometimes you can see that you can get these fractures that will
grow a little bit. They don't go very far and they don't last very long
in time. And then when the stress fields change, they are again
closed right up. So the most you see when you go back into one of
these events is one of these gas seams that people will talk about
once in a while. They saw a little, thin seam that had some
radioactivity in it. Even our calculations, at least the ones that I have
seen, never indicate that once the cavity is formed that you can
fracture out of it any more. If our calculations are right, you just
can't because the pressure in the cavity is too low by that time.
Carothers: When the cavity is expanding the material at the :'_;.;

boundary has to be moving apart and so that makes it easier for :--'-.\
something to keep pushing it apart, because it's stretching, in a way. -; .
Peterson: Yes. And when it stops stretching, and stops that
outward velocity you can look at it crudely as the momentum just
squeezes it back together. And the reflection of the stress wave - ;
from a long way away comes back too, and just squeezes it all back
shut. .'•'*•"
Carothers: There are pictures taken during the Rainier reentry •_ '.
showing thick seams of dark material, which were glass from the • -
cavity, or material from the cavity, that flowed out in the rock a long •'/ :
way.
Peterson: 1 don't know what you term a long way. If you're : '•
talking like one cavity radius outside the cavity, to me that isn't very
far at all. Something like that does not disagree with the analyses :
that we have done, and is not surprising, and 1 don't think is unusual. '"•_..
I think one could expect it. , ,.
Carothers: There was also the supposition on Rainier that this
could be attributed to a separation in bedding planes, rather than
a fracture of the native rock.
Peterson: I think that's true, but if I go back and put on a ,; • •
calculator's hat, I don't think it's fair to distinguish the fact that the . -;,
fracture went along a bedding plane. If the stresses are set up so you
x
can grow this fracture, it's obviously going to pick the easiest place
to go. If there's a fault line that's aimed in the right direction, it will
go that way. It likes to take the easiest path. So, that's where one \ •'"_
would expect to see them. I don't think it's going to start off ., •''••;
through the middle of a big bed of rock all by itself, if it could take > - -.' '*
the planes in one of the interfaces and go along that direction. ''••
I think the interesting thing from the work that's been done on ,: •
fracturing is that it has allowed us to at least think, at the present,
that we understand why Red Hot contained, and didn't just blow ','
everything out of that tunnel.
There was a plug formed in the tunnel, and that plug was
moving out fairly rapidly. If you go back and do basic back of the , .
envelope analysis, if you did have a classical cavity pressure history . •'-.
back in Red Hot, that plug should never have stopped. It should
never have even wanted to slow down. The analyses, now that we
Hydrofractures 333
can do fracture calculations, show that if you detonate something

in a cavity like Red Hot, you grow multitudes of fractures. ]ust
multitudes of them. There's no reason that the world around it
doesn't want to fracture.
Red Hot was in a pre-formed cavity, and as a result there wasn't
much plastic deformation. There weren't big stresses built up in the
material around the cavity. The cavity pressure is extremely large
compared to the stresses surrounding it. And so it likes to fract, just
as they do these massive hydrofracs in the oil field. It's analogous.
So you get multitudes of these fractures, and the harder you drive
these fractures the more of them you get. When you really drive
the rock hard, as on Red Hot, you get a tremendous number of them
that are formed.
So, you get a lot of surface area, and as you get a lot of surface
area, then you get a lot of cooling. And so you quench the pressure
really fast. Of course, that quenches the fractures, and then they
all just sort of dribble out and quit. Yet the cavity pressure has gone
down tremendously to the point that it isn't really a containment
problem. I think that's what our fracturing modeling is telling us.
In the reentry on Red Hot, over the last few years, they've found
many of these types of fractures that have been driven from that
cavity. So, the model may even be correct. I think the fracturing
work has been a very good thing to have done, and has given us
another handle on why things contain.
Duff: The leakage, the almost disaster, which was associated
with Red Hot was related not to a long, high driving cavity pressure,
but to a very poor stemming plan. It was stemmed by a wall of
sandbags, and that wall of sandbags acted as the wadding in a
shotgun. It was put in motion by the pressure, and proceeded to
knock out the succeeding closure systems, one after the other. It
came to rest twelve hundred feet down the drift, and we were just
lucky.
Carothers: John, arguments have been made that hydrofrac-
tures from the growing cavity are at least part of the reason shots
contain. Do you place any credence in that model?
Rambo: I certainly place some credence in it. I think the
hydrofractures don't go all that far because of the cracks there are
in the rocks. So, they tend to cool down, and not go too far. But
that puts, I think, a little more responsibility on us to think about

what other pathways are available for the gases to go some place. I
think hydrofractures are part of it.
Carothers: The pressure acts everywhere. There's a bedding
plane, go that way. There's a fault, go that way. You can't take
account of that in your calculations, can you?
Rambo: No, the late time phenomenon is not accounted for.
When we do run into to a residual stress problem that we want to
look at further, we take our material properties down to S-Cubed.
They can run calculations that do the dynamics, and accounts for
hydrofracture where the gas is allowed to flow out in some worst
case scenario, like a single hydrofracture. How far is that going to
go, for example. That's what we did on Barnwell, and they did
calculate a fracture that went something like a hundred, or a
hundred and fifty meters. That was a couple of cavity radii or so.
Hydrofractures don't seem to go further than that, at least in the
calculations.
Carothers: Norton, you've done a lot of calculational work on
hydrofractures. Tell me something about hydrofracturing.
Rimer: I hope I'm telling you people at the CEP that there are
limitations on what we know. Therefore we make assumptions,
which we consider conservative, and that's a funny word to use,
since we try to overestimate, and to do things in a direction to
overestimate the length of a fracture. For example, we assume that
the rock has no fracture toughness, no strength in tension at all. If
it has strength in tension, the fracture will be slightly shorter. We
assume we get one single fracture. If there are multiples, the driving
pressure will go down faster, and the fractures will be shorter. We
do the worst-case calculations, and if those are acceptable, if they
give short fractures that aren't going to threaten things, we're very
happy.
We don't know the actual details of a lot of this. For instance,
we don't know how to calculate the initiation of a fracture; a
fracture initiates at a point of weakness. How could we possibly
know where in a cavity that's going to happen, especially after the
cavity has expanded a factor of a hundred in volume, or forty in
volume, depending on which shot we're talking about? We can't
possibly know that, so we assume it initiates.
Hydrofractures 335
Another thing is that it is difficult to make clear what we mean

by a hydrofracture. The classic hydrofracture is one where the gas
breaks the rock, and pours out through that fracture. That's not
what we believe happens. We believe there are preexisting, or shot
formed, planes of weakness - - bedding planes, faults, all of which
may be closed pre-shot - - which are the likely places where
something will open, and the radiation may come out along those
planes. It's not breaking new things, in general. I don't think, in
a tamped event in tuff, that we've ever really seen a hydrofracture,
in the classic definition of a hydrofracture. What we've seen are
radioactive seams which we've encountered on mining for a new
event, two cavity radii away. We've seen radiation. The Geiger
counter registers something, otherwise, you wouldn't have noticed
it. You look more closely, and you see gray, altered tuff, which
looks like it encountered some steam. A n d , it's invariably on some
bedding plane.
It's the steam in the cavity that's the fracturing gas, and that
alters the tuff. There are other phenomena with steam, and we do
consider them. With all the models we presume the fracture
initiates, and presume only a single fracture. We can model multiple
fractures, and we have done that successfully for the junior Jade HE
experiments. Then there are a lot of degrees of modeling that we
employ in our fracture calculations.
The first thing we do is model a fracture where we assume
cavity pressure is right at the tip of the fracture as it expands. And
we only limit the speed at which it can grow by solid mechanics
considerations; fractures cannot go faster than half the Raleigh
speed - - half of the shear wave speed, roughly. We allow it to go
into any zone in the code. That gives us the most likely direction
for the hydrofracture. The next thing we do is take that direction,
and we presume a single fracture goes along that path. We insist that
only those cells that are along that path are allowed to fracture.
Now what do we do as to how the material in the fracture behaves?
We can assume it's steam, and allow it to condense, allow it to seep
into the wall, allow heat conduction into the wall. Or, we can
remove those assumptions, and make the fracture longer. We try
all sorts of different assumptions, to see where it gets us.
We include all these assumptions, or we don't include them to
give degrees of conservatism. And one of those assumptions is that
steam is in the fracture, and either it can or it cannot condense. We
calculate the temperature of the gas. We have all that capability.

Most recently Bob Nilson has put in a different approach to the fluid
flow in the fracture. He's doing a finite difference approach now,
which allows us to put in inertial effects. So, we're doing all those
detailed models. We're not maybe having the nth degree of
precision; for instance, we're modeling the steam as condensable
and not based on temperature. We're not putting a good equation
of state of steam in the code. We could, but why slow down the
calculation?
Carothers: When you say that you get the direction that the
fracture might go, what determines that? Do you put in an estimate
of the in-situ stress field?
Rimer: Within the two-dimensional limitations of the code we
put in in-situ stress fields. The vertical stress is rho*g*h; the weight
of the material above it. We put that in exactly in all of our
calculations, to the extent that the grid of the code is in equilibrium.
If we run it a million cycles, without the bomb, nothing is going to
move. That we had to do for the geophysics calculations, because
they're very late time. For the horizontal stresses, the two stress
components have to be equal, due to the two-dimensionality,
otherwise you get horizontal motion. But they don't have to be
equal to the vertical stress. And we've done calculations with those
stresses equal to the minimum stress measured pre-shot in the
ground.
Carothers: In the tunnels you have the opportunity to get in-
situ stress measurements; directions, magnitudes, and so forth?
Rimer: Yes. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's really 3-D.
One of the minimum stresses is the horizontal stress. The other
principal stress, horizontally, is usually as large as the vertical stress,
so we can't model that in the code, but it's conservative to model
that one as a minimum also, because the lower the stress, particu-
larly for a decoupled shot, the more likely a fracture path will exist.
For a tamped shot those stresses don't mean diddly, because you get
a good residual stress field.
Carothers: When the tip of the fracture is growing, what does
the tip look like? Does it have a radius, or is it a mathematical point,
or what? How do you put that in the code?
Hydrofractures 337
Rimer: The mathematicians who do this like to have it be a

mathematical point. We allow it to propagate through a cell at a
given speed. It's a simplification. The more important thing is,
what is the pressure distribution of the gas along the fracture. If
you're driving a fracture through a strong residual stress, cavity
pressure may have to go all the way to the tip before you can open
up the fracture further. In a decoupled event, we calculate a
distribution of pressure, fluid pressure, along the fracture, and
sometimes the tip is opened by tensile failure, the actual tensile
stresses in the rocks surrounding the fracture at the tip. And, you
may not have any gas at the tip, but you're still prying open the
fracture. There are a number of analytical solutions, theoretical
solutions, that Bob Nilson has tried FAST against, and we've run the
full code against simplified cases to see if we match the mathematical
solutions, and we do.
Carothers: You mentioned tensile failure. That would imply
to me you were driving steam, or water into the fracture, and that
the fracture was opening ahead of where the slug of water was.
Rimer: That's right. It's being pried open, particularly if the
material around it has not failed. If it's elastic you have this strong
rock just being pried open.
Smith: The calculators talk about the tip of the fracture being
out in front of the water, and indeed we found that in our hydrofrac
work in G tunnel. We would hydrofrac with dyed water, and then
go back and chase the fractures, the dyed marks. We would
sometimes find that the dye would quit, but there would be a
fracture in front of it, and so indeed it looked as though pushing that
water in was prying open the rock. There were sections out in front
of the dyed fluid, the water, that had fractured before the water had
gotten to it. Of course, the calculators were delighted when we
found that phenomenology, because they think they had predicted
it.
Rimer: If the material around the tip is plastic, then you don't
have a lever action, so you can't pry anything open. It's the actual
conditions in the rock that really matter. For some situations, the
actual plastic failure is very important.
Carothers: If you're doing your calculations with a two

dimensional code, isn't that a form of built-in conservatism? The
world is really three dimensional, and so many effects vary as r-
cubed, but you're taking account of them as r-squared.
Rimer: That's a very good point. I'd say yes and no. It's not
that things go as r-cubed - - we have the spherical attenuation in the
two dimensional code. The problem is the shape of the fracture. If
the fracture is horizontal, the axis of symmetry of the 2-D code
makes it a disc. That may or may not be bad. However, if the
fracture is up at an angle, like we showed as the most likely path for
Misty Echo, it makes the fracture be a cone, and that's not the same
volume for the fracture.
The worst case may be if you just had a strip that fractured, like
toward the Baneberry fault. We always felt that one of these days
we were going to get back to Baneberry, and model it assuming the
fracture is not as a complete disc or cone, but just as a little piece
in a particular direction. That would deplete the cavity pressure
less. The time when that fracture came out, which was minutes, may
be very sensitive to the amount the fracture depletes the cavity
pressure.
Ristvet: You've seen many a calculation presented at the CEP
where the peak of the stress field was about one and a half cavity
radii out beyond the cavity wall. Now we think it's out a little
beyond two cavity radii with the damage models that have come into
being. It was always comforting to see that two or three times cavity
pressure, so you could say, "Ah, there's no way it can hydrofrac out
of there." Well, there are some cases where the residual stress
would probably be very small, so I've had a number of hydrofrac
calculations done at S-Cubed. It turns out that it's very hard to
hydrofrac even if you don't have any residual stress.
We used to model everything as one hydrofrac, and maybe the
only time we ever have seen one single major hydrofrac out of a
cavity was perhaps Baneberry where there was a very preferential
pathway. There was a clay loaded fault, which I would not want to
have passing through my cavity, especially one oriented such that
the cavity grew up into it and didn't really displace it through radial
shear. 1 think that would be a very scary situation, even if we don't
create residual stress for all the other reasons that have been talked
about.
Hydrofractures 339
Kunkel: We can begin to plot the frequency of fractures at

some distance from work points by other bore holes we have drilled.
In the valley testing areas we have lots of holes, and we very
infrequently come across radiation from a previous shot in another
hole. When we do it is always the object of much curiosity.
Certainly we're not commonly getting fracturing at large distances
away from our shots, large distances being half a depth of burial.
Carothers: Byron, on your reentries, aside from Red Hot, do

you see physical evidence of hydrofractures? Have you come across
something where you said, "Yes sir, that's a hydrofrac?"
Ristvet: Yes, but it's very rare. The ones we have found have
been solitary ones, maybe two, typically along bedding planes or
pre-existing faults, and they've extended to a couple of cavity radii.
They may actually occur during the dynamic growth phase, when
the material is in tension basically, and you can have radial shear.
Usually those are very interesting, because we don't see any
glass. What we've always seen is altered tuff. It sort of looks like
gray Portland cement. We've taken tuff, and when you hit it with
a steam torch, or even a regular torch, you get this gray powdery
material. The zeolites want to go to feldspar, so you're creating
these micro-crystaline feldspars, and so these seams are easy to spot.
The USGS, back in the old TEP days of the sixties, when we were
first getting into this underground thing, were looking at all this
stuff. A n d I believe Gary Higgins did similar experiments.
Some of these seams don't have any radioactivity in them.
Some of them have slight amounts, which are probably the daughter
products of some of the early-time gaseous precursors that got out
of there. We've never re-entered soon enough to know what the
smoking gun really was, because all the lanthanum-barium stuff has
decayed away, so you really don't know what gases were down
there. You can only sort of guess.
Carothers: You make hydrofracing sound much less of a
containment threat than some people have feared.
Ristvet: I think as long as you have a coupled event, where you
don't start off with a big air-filled room, hydrofracing is not a serious
threat. A n d we've never seen any evidence of hydrofrac around any
of our low yield events in big cavities, in which the pressures are,
after a few miliseconds, typically three to four times what the
pressures are in a tamped event. I think Mr. Hudson's measure-

ments, and calculations, of those pressures are pretty close. Again,
the calculations say we should have some short stubby fractures.
We've mined right up to the cavities, mined right into them, and we
had experiments on Minnie Jade to try to detect if they ever
occurred and get a timing on them, and we never saw any.
We drilled back over Minnie jade really specifically looking,
because Minnie jade was the first of those low yield cavity shots.
The equilibrium pressure in those cavities is between five and six
thousand psi, which is more than enough to highly overwhelm the
tuff, and there's no residual stress whatsoever. Those cavities are
steam filled, and why they didn't hydrofrac is difficult to say,
because even the codes, as best as we can model things, say we
should have some close to meter long hydrofracs.
Maybe we do have hydrofracs of a few centimeters. 1 suspect
that is the mechanism, because our cavities have almost always
cooled faster than the calculations done by S-Cubed, using simple
decay models, predict. When we plug in the empirical kind of data,
we can usually predict them doggone close. 1 think we do drive
those higher pressure gases, at least partially, into the pores, and
that's a pretty effective cooling mechanism, because the pore water
is only seventy degrees Farenheit.
Smith: I did some hydrofac work in G tunnel, which evolved
into airfrac. We were driving fractures with air, and again it was to
look at the steam hydrofrac problem. We did it with air rather than
steam, because then there is one less variable to play with.
But, G tunnel kind of trickled down because they ran into
money problems, and there was also this new wave of the future with
ESscH, and all the increasing regulations. It turned out that the air
we had been breathing for years was not adequate. And the
electrical facilities were old. They would have had to upgrade all
those things, and the cost to do that would have been very, very
high. To drill a new shaft for air ventilation was prohibitively
expensive. A lot of those old tunnels were in pretty sad shape, so
they were virtually abandoned.
It was costing about 1.2 million a year to keep that tunnel
open, but there was other work in there which paid part of that.
There was work for the waste disposal folks, and there was some
interesting work on gas stimulation which was paid for by private
Hydrofractures 341
money from the Gas Research Institute of Chicago. That work was
related to the things they do to hydrofrac gas-bearing formations.
What they had in G tunnel was 1 500 feet of overburden, where they
could do the experiments, and then mine back into the areas and
look at the results. So, they were able to test a lot of assumptions
about stimulating wells with hydrofracs.
There was one experiment they did that was hydrofracing from
the surface, 1 500 feet above. They did the standard industry
practice of colored sands, and walnut shells, and all the usual stuff.
Then they started drilling holes, trying to find this fracture that was
supposed to propagate five or six hundred feet. They eventually
mined back and found out it had propagated no more than twenty
or thirty feet from where it started. It got into a region of massive
fractures and just stopped.
Carothers: As you know, people at S-Cubed have been doing
calculational work on hydrofractures; how they're formed, how
they propagate, and so on. Apparently they have come to the
conclusion that such fractures don't propagate very far - - perhaps
one or two cavity radii. Perhaps that's because you simply can't, in
a sense, pump them enough. You can't keep delivering the
necessary fluids and the necessary pressures to keep them going.
Smith: We discovered that experimentally. No way could we
get big enough air compressors to drive those things. The harder
you drive a fracture, the more the aperture opens up.
We did a whole series of shots prior to Misty Echo, called
Junior Jade. That was a series of eight pound shots, where we varied
the size of the air cavity around an eight pound charge. We were
looking at what point do you begin to create fractures. If the shot
is tightly coupled presumably it will set up the residual stress, and
there won't be fractures. At some point, if the cavity is large
enough, you won't set up any residual stress, and there will be
fractures.
All told we did about five of these shots, and on the one that
was tightly coupled, the cavity indeed grew, and we measured the
cavity pressure. We also measured the volume of these cavities with
a volumetric technique before and after the shot, and then we mined
back into them. On the tightly coupled one, we ended up with a
cavity which had grown to two or three times the original volume.
On the next step, with a larger initial cavity, fractures were

driven out. The beauty of working with HE in this soft rock is that
all the fractures are stained with the HE detonation products, which
are basically carbon, and so the black fractures just stand out like
gang busters. There were many fractures radiating out from this
cavity, and then, out about ten feet one of the fractures turned. We
knew from our old in-situ hydrofrac measurements that it went in
the direction of the in-situ stress. The fracture always opens up
against the minimum in-situ stress.
Also, the big, massive hydrofrac out of Red Hot, that goes over
to the Deep Well cavity, is tilted over. On all the hydrofrac work
we had done, the fractures were all vertical, and so I asked myself,
"Why is that fracture tilted over? Surely, it's in-situ stress that
controls that thing." Then we started doing some more hydrofrac
work a little bit closer to the portal, and there all the fractures tilted
over.
As you play with that, you discover that there is a topographic
effect. As you move out from underneath the cap of the mesa,
you're seeing the sloping surface of the front of the mesa. And,
when you go around a bend the fracture also turns, and it's tilted.
Both the azimuth and the inclination of the fracture is affected by
the the topographic surface. When you get down underneath the
cap of the mesa, all the fractures become vertical. So that answered
that question.
So, when the fractures got far enough away from the cavities,
they turned, because they're controlled by the in-situ stress. On an
HE scale we were able to show that phenomenology of driving
fractures, and actually look at them. With those five shots, going
from fully tamped to decoupled, we could say that in-situ stress was
controlling there. But, we still don't understand the answer to this:
when the HE goes off, how does the shot know whether there's going
to be an in-situ stress field and not be able to drive fractures, versus
it's decoupled and can drive fractures? One thinks of the residual
stress phenomena as something happening later on, and containing
the fractures, but it looks like these fractures grew as part of the
dynamic process, because the fractures grew, and the cavity didn't
expand. AM that pressure was lost out into the fractures.
Hydrofractures 343
Until that time we always thought of fractures leaving the

cavities because there was no residual stress field in a partially
decoupled shot. The fractures grew in response to the cavity
pressure being higher than the residual stress. But it turns out that
it's part of the dynamic process, right at the start. The calculations
say that the residual stress field sets up when the material rebounds,
and that's fairly late.
Almost invariably when we mined back we would not run into
any fractures on a fully tamped, fully grouted shot. First you would
start hitting softer material, and there was a very distinct boundary
between this material and the rock that hadn't been altered, or
damaged. You could tell it with a geology pick. Then you hit the
cavity. Now, occasionally we would find a black-filled fracture.
And occasionally on DNA shots they will run into a radioactive
fracture, but it's not the common experience.
Carothers: It is only fairly recently that people have begun to
say that while there is residual stress, it isn't necessarily as large as
calculated, or as uniform, or doesn't last very long, and the basic
mechanism is hydrofracturing which reduces the cavity pressure by
absorbing a lot of energy.
Hudson: I can't argue with that. I think a much more
believable scenario than the residual stress scenario is having high
pressure fluid flowing out of the cavity in fractures. It probably
happens all the time. If these fractures are generally distributed,
let's say in all directions, then probably it's a good thing. The gas
is just distributed evenly in all directions through a large volume, the
pressure falls, and it doesn't get to the surface. That may be what
happens every time you fire an event. On the other hand, every
event may be different. On some events the gas may be bottled up,
and they're the ones you should worry about. On other events it
may escape quickly, and you shouldn't worry at all. So maybe the
really big residual stress field is a bad thing to have, because it keeps
things bottled up. We don't know.
Bass: Carl Smith did a bunch of shots in G tunnel called Junior
Jade. He wanted to look at cracking out of the cavity. Joe LaComb
sponsored it, and it was a very interesting bunch of work. It falls in
with some of the Sandia work on how do you gas frac tuff, and things
like that. And the answer is, of course, that you gas frac, or you
fracture a well with a propellant, not with an explosive. You want
a slow burning propellant to do this work. Well, Junior Jade was

very interesting in this respect because as he changed the size of the
cavity you have no cracking, and then you have cracking.
It really threw a real mess into the hands of all the DNA
calculational people, because they were not calculating cavity size
right, or anything else. Calculating cavity size is almost impossible.
You've got to have the right material model, you've got to have the
right damage model, and nobody's got it.
Carothers: Dan, you can take cores and squash them, and so
on, but that core isn't necessarily representative of a block the size
of this room, or this building, which may have one or more fractures
running through it. Therefore, while rebound is certainly real, it
may be more faith than anything else when you say, "I ran some
calculations, and I got a good residual stress field, so this shot is
okay." So, there seems to be a body of opinion that an important
mechanism for containment is that there are lots of fractures that
grow while the cavity is growing and the material at the walls is
stretching. They don't go very far, but there are a lot of them, and
that dumps a lot of energy, so the cavity pressure goes down, and
that's what really happens. What are your comments about that?
Patch: 1 don't think there's anywhere near sufficient volume
or time available to get rid of a significant amount of the cavity gas,
or the energy that's in the cavity that way. It's conceivable that in
a decoupled cavity shot, or a partially decoupled cavity shot like Red
Hot, fractures can have a significant influence on the cavity state,
although I've always been a little bit bothered by that. I don't see
any way, on the average tamped shot, that you can grow crack
volumes that are significant fractions of the total cavity volume, so
it's hard to see how they can influence the conditions in the cavity.
Carothers: Then my question is, "Why don't all shots vent?"
Something has to stop fractures which could grow to the surface.
Patch: Yes, something has to do it. The cavity pressures are
known, and measured, to be higher than the kind of pressures it
takes to hydrofracture the media. We've done many hydrofracture
tests in the tuffs, and the minimum fracture pressures are 300 to
700 psi - - they're not that big. Now the opposing school could say,
"Well, that's okay, because there's a lot of molten rock around, and
you're just plugging up those cracks with molten rock." So, there
Hydrofractures 345
are many facets to the argument, and they confuse, or add

ammunition to either camp. I think there is plenty of evidence that
the geostructure certainly perturbs the stress state locally, because
we have data from the many reentries that DNA has done. And it's
not unusual to come across a radioactive seam within roughly two
cavity radii, or thereabouts.
Carothers: That's not a very long fracture.
Patch: No, it's not long. And the seams generally are not that
hot, in the radioactive sense. You get some detectable amount of
activity, but you don't get high readings. My impression is that
they're not that frequent either; you don't run into a gigantic
network, or a whole nest of these things. There will be one or two,
or maybe three, on a reentry that are potentially bothersome when
you get in close enough.
347
13
Block Motion
In the post-shot reentries that DNA has done in the tunnels it

has been observed that large blocks of rock have moved and been
displaced as a result of the shot. On the emplacement hole detona-
tions there is no reentry other than post-shot drilling to recover
samples for radiochemical analysis, so the fact or effect of such
block motions is not known for those events. What effect such
motions have on postulated containment mechanisms such as the
residual stress field, or on such phenomena such as cavity growth or
size, is a matter of conjecture. Before the device is detonated it is
not possible to say which, if any, block might move, or how much
it might move. The question, however, is an important one for
persons designing a line-of-sight pipe with various closure mecha-
nisms which are to protect the samples that are to be exposed. It is
possible that motions of the rocks could damage the sample protec-
tion hardware, and cause the loss of much of the data and equipment
that typically is used on the effects shots in the tnnels.
Carothers: One of the things people have seen on post-shot
tunnel reentries in Rainier Mesa is block motion. Now, when people
talk about block motion, are they talking about blocks the size of this
building, or the size of this desk?
Orkild: It depends. A block can be a piece of rock between two
cracks; two joints, or two faults. A crack is just an break. "Joint"
is a generic term referring to how the crack was formed; a joint is
generally formed by cooling, and normally by definition is a crack
that has no motion on it. A fault has had movement. So, depending
on the spacing of the joints and faults, blocks can have sizes from
little cubes to the size of buildings. And, if you move one block you
have to move the other blocks.
The Rainier unit itself, called Rainier Mesa tuff, is a series of
blocks. Erosion has been going on long enough that the cooling
joints have opened up, and those blocks are just sitting there,
basically held together by gravity. When something happens, those
blocks do move among themselves. As you go deeper into the Mesa,
I think the cracks are smaller, but you still have a series of blocks.
And, as you go deeper, gravity is holding them together better and
better, until your eye might not be able to detect them as blocks.
When you detonate a nuclear device, some of those blocks
move around a little. This one might move a lot easier than that one,
this other one might not move at all. We only know what we see in
the reentry drifts, but we do see that. When you go back into the
tunnel you can observe, and see that this block slid up over that
block x-number of inches. Blocks do move, and you wonder why
that bed down there stayed there, and this bed up here moved.
Then you look and say, "Ah, here's a nice clay zone that this bed
can slide on. It can move along that much easier than the one below
can move along that gravel bed below it. That's much more
difficult." So, blocks do move with respect to each other. We have
seen up to a number of feet of motion.
Carothers: The picture I've gotten from what you've said is
that we could look at Rainier Mesa as a large piece of material that
has a lot of more or less vertical joints and faults, and a number of
more or less horizontal layers, which were laid down at different
times. And so, in a way it's a fairly loose pile of stuff, on a very big
scale.
Orkild: That's correct, on a very large scale. Now, the
Marshmallow site, in Area 16, was essentially completely shattered,
broken, and cracked. When they mined into it, it was just sitting
there as a mass of rocks, held there by gravity, and it was slowly
creeping down the hill. Each time it got bumped, it jiggled a little
bit and settled back again. The cracks readjusted, and the gases
would seep out here and there. Many, many years from now Rainier
Mesa will be like that - - essentially a pile of rubble. The blocks are
getting smaller and smaller as time goes on.
Ristvet: Block motion is interesting to me is because I got
involved with it when I was first at DNA. That was in relation to
survivability of underground structures, from both a defensive and
a strategic aspect. The big question was, at what stress levels do
these motions occur? I said, "Well, it's really more of a displace-
ment level than a stress level."
Block Motion 349
There's two kinds of block motions in a gross sense, and one

has a subset. There's shock-induced block motion, where you're
driving it with the displacements of the cavity. There's also shock-
triggered block motions, and we've seen a little of that at the Test
Site. The high yield shots that were done up on Pahute Mesa
triggered a lot of aftershock activity, which results from built-in
strains along the pre-existing tectonic discontinuities and faults. All
we have ever seen in Rainier Mesa, in all the tunnel events, has been
the shock-induced kind of motion.
Now, there are two types of shock-induced block motion.
There are the motions that occur along already existing
discontinuities, usually bedding planes with some sort of material
along them that has very low shear strength. It's usually a very thin
layer of montmorillonite clay, typically forty or fifty percent or so.
Those motions are well documented. Typically they occur out to
between two and three cavity radii. It's rare to see them out beyond
that, but they have occurred out to as far as six cavity radii. But,
those motions are very small.
We've also seen motion on faults. It's interesting because the
faults move, if they're lubricated, but they also seem to be very
affected by the in-situ stress field. At the Test Site the faults that
strike northwest don't move, but the faults that strike northeast do
move. Those happen to be oriented properly with respect to the
minimum and maximum in-situ stresses, which are almost horizon-
tal, and ninety degrees to each other at the Test Site. One is equal
to the overburden, and the other is significantly less - - two, three,
four hundred psi less, and that's because of the crustal extension
going on.
The other kind of block motion is when you get in very close
to the cavity, and I don't think this kind extends more than about
half a cavity radius from the edge of the cavity. Again this is in the
tuffs, in the tunnels, and only in the horizontal equitorial plane. This
kind of motion stops very close-in, and that's not where the residual
stress field is. You see lots of schlickensided faces - - shears - - and
they are almost always either perfectly radial to the cavity, or
perfectly tangential and they're quite frequent. This is from
observations.
Carothers: How much motion do you see? A few inches, a few

feet?
Ristvet: Anything from a few millimeters up to . . . probably
some of the largest motions we have seen, which were on Diablo
Hawk, were motions of thirteen or fourteen feet, on a bedding
plane. There was also a fault that was in part related to that bedding
plane motion which moved, and totally cut off the drift. There was
about six and a half feet of horizontal motion, and two feet of
vertical, and that essentially cut the drift off.
Carothers: It would seem that the likelyhood of getting such
motion would depend on the way the drift was oriented in the stress
field.
Ristvet: Very true.
Carothers: Do you pay any attention to that?
Ristvet: Well, yes and no. As far as siting an event, it doesn't
seem to make a lot of difference. In the case of the group of
experiments from Miner's Iron through Mighty Oak, it did make a
difference because it really reduced the potential for the kinds of
block motion that would help keep stemming in. It's interesting that
on the events where we have had good block motion, where it's been
oriented such that the residual stress field and the faults crossing the
drifts would probably move, we've always had very good
containment. And certainly Misty Rain was not oriented properly,
even though we did see one very major block motion, which was
along a pre-existing fault.
Carothers: If you think it's good, then it would seem you could
turn the drift a little and have it the way you think would enhance
this block motion.
Ristvet: Yes, we could, but if we did that we'd run out of real
estate very quickly. It's a desirable secondary feature, I think. Of
course, on Misty Rain, it was almost an undesirable feature. The
only two faults in Misty Rain that were mapped, that crossed the
drift, were the two that moved. And one caught the TAPS, which
then didn't close. We modified the TAPS after that experience to
give us more clearance, so if it ever happened again the door would
probably come down and seal. What happened is, the shroud is very
thin metal, whereas the rest is very thick. Now, the movement was
very small. It was less than an inch, but it was enough to buckle the
Block Motion 351
metal, which caught the door, just barely. When we went in there,
even though the door looked very secure, one did not want to go
underneath it without putting a little bracing there.
Carothers: You also talk about residual stress, and it might be
that if you do get such motion, it's going to inhibit or decrease the
formation of the residual stress.
Ristvet: What it does is, it spreads it out over a bigger area, or
a bigger volume. Consequently the peak is greatly degraded, and
allows the relaxation to take place a lot faster, because you're having
rock creep occuring along these planes as the residual stress is trying
to set up. What I'm talking about is not new, and the modelers who
work with the continuum models have been very aware that is
probably what real life is like. We've just always felt it comforting
when we thought these motions didn't degrade it as much as perhaps
it does.
Bass: We have noticed these random motions; indeed, these
disordered motions occur. There's no question about that, but I
don't believe they're controling.
Carl Smith had a very interesting experience on one event. He
and I put in a thing called a SCEMS - - a Self Contained Environmen-
tal Measurement System. Sandia has been doing them off and on
for years and years. You put in this very strong unit, and then go
back and recover it after the shot. And hope it has worked.
Actually it has worked on some occasions. Right now it's a dead
issue; it should never be fielded again. The last time it cost a quarter
of a million dollars, and the data return was absolutely zero.
Carl did get some data on an event not too long ago. He had
one of these units up at five kilobars, and that was the closest we
thought we could go. In order to make the measurements Carl put
some cables out from it, to gauges maybe twenty feet in front of it.
We also put gauges in the body of the machine, so when those cables
got broken we would still get something. I had designed these
SCEMS in the past, and in an attempt to make it move with the
surrounding rocks we put big fins around it to tie it to the mountain.
That works, and they do tie it to the mountain. The accelerometers
on-board and off-board did show the same thing. And when you
integrate them they showed the same thing, within limits.
When Carl went back in, the guys who did the reentry were
very careful about it and took a lot of good pictures, and you can
see this chaotic motion of the type Russ Duff talks about. Here sits
the SCEMS, and there sits the outboard gauge. Between the gauge
and the SCEMS the cable does the damnedest didos you've ever
seen. It's moved three feet this way, and two feet that way, and
everything else. And the motion had cut the cable in various places.
That rock does not just move radially out, in detail, but the general
motion is outward.
Carl has looked at permanent displacements for eight or ten
events, and put them all together, and has gotten a very nice curve
out of it. Even up in the kilobar regime, and these would be up to
five and eight kilobars, which is about as close as you can get back
in and measure and have any accuracy, outward motion is absolutely
a straight function. Inside there's terrific chaos, but that doesn't
necessarily destroy the possibility of a stress cage.
Smith: There aren't any easy answers about block motion. The
questions are all research problems.
We did field, about three shots ago, one of the so-called
SCEMS units - - Self Contained whatever. You can't make the cables
survive as close in as the gauges were, so you have this self contained
recording unit. Then, you dig back, recover it, and read out the
recording. There was about twenty feet separation between with
the gauge and the recorder. And, there was a big fault that went
through the space where they were separated. On the reentry we
found that the fault had moved, but a foot this side of the hole with
the cable in it there was another hole, and that hole was intact. That
fault moved six or eight inches, and it was a massive fault that
extended for numerous feet, but the movement didn't extend in one
direction at all, because it didn't cut the other hole.
That makes you think, "Yes, these big fractures occur, and
move at least six inches." But if you look at them on a global extent,
they just don't extend anywhere. You've got all this massive block
movement, but when you go and look at that fracture very carefully,
and look at the other evidence, you discover that there are just
numerous of these short fractures. Now, when you mine back and
see what looks like massive block movement, it may be a whole
Block Motion 353
series of short fractures where each of them may have moved six or
eight inches. But, I don't think those fractures extend for tens of
feet. As I said, I think it's a research problem.
Bass: We also now have some data about when those blocks
move. We had never had a timing of when blocks moved until Misty
Echo. On Misty Echo I got a lucky break. I found a place to put
instrumentation on a fault that Dean Townsend absolutely promised
me would move. And, it was out at the tenth kilobar regime. So,
being at a tenth kilobar I could get cables to last. I had three-axis
accelerometers on each side of that fault, and we watched it move,
and we know when it moved. And we know that it moved
contemporaneously with the peak particle velocity. It moved right
away. So, I think block motions are occuring during the peak of the
particle velocity, which I think is a helpful thing. That's before the
stress cage is formed. That's important.
For a long time people thought blocks or faults moved in
seconds. But on Misty Echo they moved right at the peak particle
velocity, and a funny thing happened to these blocks. They were
sitting there, side by side. In radial motion outward, they moved
together. In horizontal motion they moved together. In vertical
motion they didn't. The one farthest from the device rose up over
the other block, which went out and down. That lasted about for
six hundred milliseconds, and then they moved off together. The
bigger block behind became the controlling block, and started
moving down. This is well documented.
The motion lasted a second, and we ended up saying it moved
seven centimeters, that there should be a seven centimeter vertical
displacement at that point. That was at one second. We said,
"Okay, that's interesting. That should be interesting for seismic
source mechanisms, and a few things like that." We asked joe
LaComb to go back in and verify this by reentry. He came back and
said that there was no motion at all. What happened was that the
shotcrete didn't break. I said, "Damn it, there was motion. Go back
and look again." Joe listened to me, thank God, and he sent FscS
back in again to knock the shotcrete off. I said it moved seven
centimeters - - it had moved five. I think that's a fantastic bit of
data, as to when it moved, and how much it moved.
The question about if there is all this motion, what does it do

to the stress cage - -1 think the answer is that the motion takes place
before the stress cage is formed. The stress cage forms on rebound.
Carothers: You said the motion you measured took place
during a period of like a second.
Bass: But that was way, way out. That was long, slow stuff.
The blocks were still moving way, way away from the working point.
But that's a good point. You've caught me in a problem there, but
what we measured was a long way from the working point. And
those blocks were moving together at that time.
Carothers: The stress cage sets up, if there is such a thing,
presumably in less than a second. So, if all these blocks are going
to do all this moving around before that stress field sets up, they
have to do it in less than a second.
Bass: All the close in ones that affect containment. I think they
are all pretty well calmed down by then.
Duff: On the reentry of Misty Rain they drove a tunnel
between the initial Iine-of-sight tunnel and the work tunnel. It was
roughly six meters to the side of the main tunnel. They observed
nine faults, which were not recognized pre-shot, over a range of
some twenty meters or so. They didn't get very close to the cavity
boundary, but there were new sources of displacement even that far
out.
Jenkins: In order to get a feel for the spacing of faults all you
have to do is look at the outcrops surrounding Yucca Flat. You can
see that the density of faulting is much greater than we show in the
cross sections. I think that holds pretty well throughout the tuff
units, especially the stronger ones, like those buried under the
alluvium, for instance.
A number of very small movements along the faults would give
the impression that the blocks are shifting. And they do, but on a
scale that's difficult to illustrate. In other words, instead of making
very tiny lines on the cross section, you put in the dip of the unit,
and the boundary of what you think will be the major faults.
Block Motion 355
Carothers: So, if I want to talk about very small fractures,

faults if you will, I will find them every couple of meters in the Test
Site? That's typical of basin-range geology?
Jenkins: Yes, it is.
Carothers: It is hard for me to visualize what happens when a
block of material the size of this building moves a foot or so. Where
does the material go that used to be where the block moved to?
Jenkins: Well, along faults, especially rotational faults, you
have a lot of problems with conservation of material. It's awfully
hard to do. The material goes some place, and we never seem to
know where that is. But, we can see the fact that the block has
moved. It was here, and now it's down there. Or over there. It's
terribly difficult to draw an accurate cross section because of this
very fact. Whenever you start pulling the world apart, something
goes wrong such that you lose part of the material that was in there.
Duff: We did a fairly careful job of trying to measure the
displacement of an interface on Mighty Epic. This was an event
where the Paleozoic rock was coming up underneath the working
point, in one direction away from the Iine-of-sight tunnel, at right
angles to it. The interface got within seventy to ninety meters of a
horizontal tunnel that was perpendicular to the Iine-of-sight tunnel.
A fairly elaborate experimental program was undertaken to try to
measure the displacement of the interface that was predicted to
occur.
The Paleozoic, being hard, strong rock would not move, the
tuffs would move over the top of it, and one should see a sliding
along this interface. Such sliding would represent a potential threat
to underground deeply buried assets of one sort or another, such as
a deeply buried command post, or missile silo, for example. So,
they wanted to know, could it be predicted? This elaborate
measurement program was undertaken, and indeed the expected
displacement occurred. The only trouble was, it didn't occur at the
interface we were looking at. It occurred at a weakness in the tuff,
some distance above the interface. There was a weakness there that
we hadn't known about. That is an example of a weakness that was
exercised in a particularly dramatic way. Motions of a meter or two
occurred. We were able to find it after the shot, but we didn't find
it before the shot. We went back and looked at pre-shot records,
and cores, and we were unable to identify it.
1 think that there are probably a very large number of other
displacements that occur that we never recognize because we don't
know what was there before the shot. We do relatively little looking
close-in to an explosion. The Laboratories never, or almost never,
do, and DNA is restricted in its efforts by money, and time, and
difficulty, and all the other things that really do apply in the real
world.
Carothers: You were talking about the world being
inhomogeneous.
Duff: Intrinsically inhomogeneous.
Carothers: Let me offer a thought. The world is inhomogeneous
on any scale that you care to use to look at it. If you want to start
with a scale of a few thousand miles or so, there's space, and then
there's atmosphere, and then there's dirt. If you want to go to an
atomic scale, there is silicon, and carbon, and oxygen. On a
somewhat larger scale there are molecules, then grains of minerals,
and then you to get pebbles, and cobbles, and on and on. How that
affects your predictions, it seems to me, is a question that can only
be answered if you tell me the wavelength of the phenomena you're
concerned with. Would you comment on that?
Duff: 1 think that's a very crucial point, and one that does
indeed need discussion. 1 think the scale of the disturbance that
we're concerned with in a nuclear test is, or can be, characterized
by one of the characteristic dimensions of the test. Let's call that
one the cavity radius.
Carothers: That would seem to be a reasonable dimension to
choose.
Duff: Yes. Therefore, I think inhomogeneities that occur on
scales that are of that order of magnitude can influence the
phenomenology. And my point is that the modeling that we have
done, largely that DNA has done, is based on measurements of
pieces of rock core which are measured in centimeters. Whereas,
we know from reentry observations that there are non-uniform
motions that are occurring on dimensions of meters or tens of
Block Motion 357
meters. I think this points up a disconnect, an intellectual discon-

nect, between the phenomena we are concerned with and the data
that we're using to try to describe it.
If we find that motions are dominated by what happens at
faults, interfaces, bedding planes - - non-uniformities of one sort or
another, as was pointed out by Livermore in the Rainier work in
1960 or so - - then we are remiss in basing our study of phenom-
enology on the response of homogeneous material, measured on the
scale of centimeters.
Carothers: Dan, if you're going to think about loads on
hardware, and plugs, and so on, what about the observed fact that
large blocks of rock move? How do you take account of that?
Patch: I think dealing with block motion before the fact is
almost an exercise in futility. The reason I say that is because you
can predict, based on a number of rules of thumb, and empirical
evidence, and some modeling too, kind of the region in which you
would expect block motion and maybe make a guess as to what the
amplitude is going to be. And you might be relatively close, if
you're lucky. But you can't actually say, "This block is going to
move. This one, not that one, and this is how far it's going to
move." Our experience is that sometimes a very minor feature will
move a lot, and a very major feature won't move at all. To figure
out exactly how this is going to play out, pre-shot, is not in the cards.
Carothers: I believe that. Apparently there was block motion
on Misty Rain, and it severed the pipe. Some people have said,
"That was pretty lucky, because if that hadn't happened it might
have behaved like Mighty Oak." Is that true?
Patch: I know there are a number of very smart people who
believe that very strongly. And I don't. Part of my feeling on block
motion is that it perforce comes relatively late. I wouldn't disagree
with folks who say it gets started right away, but it's a cumulative
thing, and it has to occur on time scales that are comparable to the
cavity growth scales. So, you really get these substantial offsets late
in the dynamic motion. I don't know any other way it can happen.
Carothers: Presumably large amounts of material are moving.

If you're concerned with the survival of hardware, that postulated
mechanism would be a concern, and something you would have to
think about. What you do about it, I don't know.
Patch: We perhaps have been lucky, but the only instance I can
think of where block motion apparently affected the closure was on
Midas Myth, where there seemed to be some kind of offset motion
that torqued the housing on the TAPS and kept the door from
closing all the way. But by and large, because block motion is, let
me say, pervasive, we've been fairly lucky in not having something
go right through our pieces of hardware.
On the other hand, we have an amazing propensity on these
low yield shots, purely by the luck of the draw, to put the FAC right
behind a fault. On almost every one of those shots, maybe not the
last couple, but certainly there was a string of about three or four
at least, where there was a fairly major fault right in front of the FAC
itself. Indeed, on one of them, I think Diamond Beach, it actually
cut right through the nose of the FAC if you drew the plane. They
have not threatened the survival of those closures; that is, the
closures have all survived post-shot.
Now, such motions did cause a whole lot of unusual local
motion in the stemming itself, in the vicinity of the FAC, on
Diamond Beech in particular, where grout was extruded out and
around it. There were some strange things that were difficult to
figure out. So 1 guess I would say block motion hasn't seemed to
pose a real threat to the closure hardware, but there are certainly
cases where it has severed the tunnel, where there has been almost
a full offset. It's made grout go strange places you wouldn't predict
pre-shot very well.
Carothers: Here you are, scratching your head, and you're
calculating, and you're doing the best job you can. And lurking
somewhere over in that mountain is this big block, maybe. Or
maybe not. Maybe it's going to move. Maybe not. Maybe it's going
to move an inch, maybe it's going to move ten feet. What's it going
to do to the hardware? Basically you have no mechanism to deal
with that, or I can't imagine how you could.
Block Motion 359
Patch: I think the way we deal with that is probably pragmati-

cally, and that is to say that we don't want a design that depends on
the survival of any one feature. And so we're willing to take our
chances. Generally when these blocks move it's the whole mountain
that moves, and trying to resist it somehow by building an extra
strong structure is, I think, not very likely to be successful.
Carothers: Personally, I have a hard time conceptuallizing this
block motion. Presumably this block, which is the size of this room,
or this building, moves. Something had to get out of the way.
Patch: You've put your finger on a problem that I have all the
time. That's right; it doesn't have a void to move into. Simplisti-
cally, if you take a box of sugar cubes and start trying to move them
around, if you start trying to grow a cavity in the middle of a box
of sugar cubes, very strange things happen, unless they can deform
in some way.
Peterson: Some people have stated that the reason we've had
problems with some of the events, Mighty Oak being the worst, was
the fact that we went to larger pipe tapers. They have postulated
that once we went to the larger pipe tapers, the only reason we've
had containment is because we've had very fortuitous block motion.
That block motion has served to sever the LOS drift, and prevent
things from leaking. Now, there's quite a bit of evidence on some
shots that we have had block motion. For example, it looks as
though block motion cut the drift on Misty Rain. People speculate
that if it hadn't cut it quite as much as it did, Misty Rain would have
looked like Mighty Oak.
There are clearly identifiable instances where a block of
material has moved. Misty Rain is one example, and I think it's true
on most of the events. It is documented on numbers of events.
There was some on Mighty Oak as well, but you can then always
argue that it wasn't enough.
Carothers: You could also argue that was what caused the
problem.
Peterson: Well, that's the next point I was getting to. I can go
to the other extreme of looking at, say, what is called the "tired
mountain," which I think is maybe more properly said as shock
conditioning occurs out to a larger radius then we can measure by
going in and doing sonic measurements, or accoustic measurements,
or seismic measurements. Or, than we can determine from doing

material properties tests. I think Russ Duff speculates it is because
of this that one can say there is enhanced block motion. In other
words, if you have more and more events in a place, you sort of
jiggle the joints, and it allows them to slip easier, and that can
enhance the block motion. If you enhance the block motion, then
there's no reason for a residual stress field, as we think we get when
we do our standard one or two dimensional calculations, to form.
Carothers: Wouldn't it depend on how big the blocks are?
Peterson: That's true. But you don't know that such a stress
field forms anyway, and there's a possibility that it doesn't. And of
course, if you don't develop the stresses so you really squeeze the
tunnel shut, and form a stemming plug as we calculate, then of
course you need the block motion to cut the tunnel.
Carothers: Well, I think there's unequivocal evidence, on a
number of tunnel events, that the tunnel after the shot was smaller
than it was to begin with. And it's not that it's been sheared, it's
just smaller. That would seem to me to imply that there has been
a considerable stress in those materials.
Peterson: Absolutely. I agree with what you say. What I was
trying to say was that if we follow the block motion argument to
some extreme, if you get much of it I think it could lower the stresses
in certain regions. It might enhance them in certain other regions.
If you happen to have an event in which you get block motion that
lowers the stresses along the stemming column, then you may not
set up a stemming plug. If you do not set up the stemming plug, and
you still don't wish it to leak, then you better hope the block motion
was enough so it severed the tunnel. Somehow you have to have
something that stops the cavity gas from leaking out.
If you get block motion to the extent that you do not get good
formation of a stemming plug, then you probably need the block
motion in order to stop the leakage. It's a Catch 22, which is the
point I was trying to make. If I follow the argument to the extreme,
it's almost to the point that if you get significant block motion, then
you probably need the block motion in order to prevent leakage.
Or, you could look at the other extreme - - if you don't get the
block motion, then you probably set up a stress field similar to what
we calculate, and then you don't need the block motion. Which of
Block Motion 361
these is right, or whether it's a combination of the two, and those

are the ones that really get you in trouble, the ones that fall in the
middle, I don't know.
Carothers: It's hard for the layman to imagine how very large
blocks of rock, perhaps as large as this building, move around in the
earth. If such a thing happens, then lots of other blocks must be
moving too.
Peterson: Yes. I am not an expert on block motion, but DNA
has a fairly large program that studies block motion for some of their
work. They have done a lot of studies, and so it's a very well
documented phenomenon. If you go back to the Rainier reports,
one of the things discussed in those reports is that it wasn't just a
uniform expansion of the material. There really were very large
blocks of material that moved relative to one another.
Some of the data indicate that the motion comes somewhat late
in terms of some of the time scales we talk about. It takes time for
a very large block of material to move. We're not talking small
things. They are very, very big pieces.
Carothers: Dimensions of hundreds of feet, possibly.
Peterson: Easily. So they don't move instantly. DNA has
much information, and inside about two cavity radii it's very
difficult to understand what's going on. One of the reasons is
because things just don't move radially out. You can't count on
everything to move radially out from the source.
Carothers: Or to put it another way, you cannot count on
calculations based on the assumption that the earth is a homoge-
neous material. Which is what you do in one dimensional calcula-
tions.
Peterson: That's true. We can put in layers in some of our two
dimensional calculations, but in general we don't know enough of
what is there. We might know about one fault, and maybe we could
put it in a calculation, but maybe there are others there that we
don't know about, that are maybe just as important. So you really
don't know how to put the structure in a calculation. It's difficult
to do if you know it, and if you don't know it, it just gets that much
more difficult.
I don't mean to imply by this that 1 believe it's either the block
motion that's made the changes we have seen, or that it's the
increase in pipe taper that's made those changes. 1 have found both
arguments interesting, because the increased pipe taper one says,
"You had to have block motion in order to get containment on the
recent shots." The larger damage region argument says, "We're
developing block motions because we were continually shaking the
ground in the region where we do the shots." If you follow it to the
next level, you can say, "If you have block motion, then you need
block motion to get containment." But you could follow it back the
other way and say, "If I don't have block motion, then things might
work the way they always have sometime in the past."
Carothers: There is another set of detonations; those which
occur in Yucca Flat. No line-of-sight, no tunnel. There's just the
emplacement hole and its stemming. I don't understand how the
block motion argument might apply to those shots. Does block
motion occur only because the tunnel is there? Suppose there were
no tunnel.
Peterson: I don't believe that the tunnel has anything at all to
do with the block motion, or very, very little to do with it. I think
it's the motion that occurs as a result of the natural discontinuities
in the ground before the shot. I think the block motions generally
occur independent of whether that little tunnel is or is not there. I
don't think the tunnel causes block motion.
In Yucca Flat, when a device is detonated in the tuffs, I think
blocks probably do move there also, but in a stemmed hole I don't
believe it necessarily bothers you at all.
Carothers: Well, the evidence is that it doesn't. Of course, in
emplacement holes all there is in the first few hundred feet is a
bunch of gravel and a few plugs.
Peterson: Yes. And so they'll never see it, or it doesn't really
matter to them at all. I believe it's something that we in containment
need to think about, however. I personally don't know what the
answer is.
Carothers: Let me disagree with you. The evidence in the Flat
is that whether it occurs or doesn't occur is of no concern. The
concern, really, is on the part of the DNA people who could to lose
Block Motion 363
their experiments and samples. It does not seem to be a containment

concern, at least for stemmed emplacement holes that do not have
a Iine-of-sight pipe.
Peterson: You are absolutely correct. Since 1 work for DNA,
I think of close-in containment as being extremely important. In
terms of release to the atmosphere, I don't think it is a containment
issue at all.
Drill rig with stabbing tower on right side.

365
14
Depths of Burial, Drilling
Probably the most important factor in the containment of an

underground nuclear detonation is the depth at which it is buried. It
is fairly certain that a device of any yield detonated at the center of
the earth would not release any activity to the surface. Conversly,
a device of however small a yield, detonated on the surface, would
obviously release radioactivity into the atmosphere. So, some-
where between these reducto ad absurdum limits there is a depth for
a given yield which will surely prevent a release of radioactivity to
the atmosphere. Given sufficient depth, and proper stemming of the
necessary emplacement hole, all the considerations of cavity forma-
tion, residual stress cages, material properties, calculational mod-
els, geologic setting, and so forth become irrelevant.
Like most other statements of obvious, simple solutions to
complex problems, the one above is essentially useless in the face
of the real-life constraints that exist in dealing with the problem.
The first and most immediate constraint is usually money, and in the
preparations for an underground detonation how and where the
device is placed determines a large fraction of what the eventual
cost will be. Drilling six, eight, ten foot diameter holes is not an
inexpensive activity, and the cost per foot of depth increases as the
hole gets deeper.
As noted in the section on hydrology, the Test Site is one of the
few place in the world where the water table is as deep as 500 meters,
but devices with a yield above about sixty to seventy kilotons must
be emplaced deeper than that. Below that depth the hole will fill
with water. To keep that water away from the device and the
equipment that is emplaced, the hole must be cased with a liner that
will be water-tight; a costly procedure.
Expensive electrical cables that carry the firing signals to the
device, the necessary power to the diagnostic equipment, and ones
used to return the data from the detectors must run from the surface
to the bottom of the hole. For these and other reasons there is a
substantial financial incentive to fire the device at the minimum

depth, which will obviously depend on the yield, required for
successful containment.
Higgins: Starting in about the year after Rainier, 1958, we
started the Plowshare program. Plowshare, as it was then envi-
sioned, was going to include a lot of things, like stimulation of gas
wells, and excavation; the nonmilitary applications of nuclear
explosives. The questions raised by those applications extended
beyond just the cavity puddle and the radiochemical analysis of the
samples from the explosion. They went into things like, "Well, how
far do the fractures extend? Or there are any fractures?" We knew
by then there were some. "Where is the heat, and how much of it
is available to recover?" And, "Suppose that, instead of shooting
the shot in tuff at the Test Site, we fired it in salt. Wouldn't all the
steam stay in then? Salt is impermeable, plastic, and solid. Won't
all the steam stay in the bubble and be ready to be recovered?"
So, starting in 1958, the Plowshare program put a lot of effort
into trying to answer questions like that. They were important
questions, and we didn't have answers for them. We began to be
concerned about effects other than just the rad chem sampling.
Being quite naive in some respects, one of the things we thought was
that it would be a good idea to try a series of Rainier-like explosions.
These would be a few kilotons at most, and they would be in a lot
of different kinds of materials, to see in what way the properties of
the medium influenced the effects that we observed.
These were to be pure science shots. We designed a set which
included a shot in granite, a shot in as pure salt as we could find, a
shot in some kind of carbonate rock, which at that time we called
limestone. I believe that early on we also talked about a shot in
basalt, as opposed to tuff, which really isn't much like any other rock
in the world. However, it turns out that there really is a lot of tuff,
so it's not as irrelevant as we thought at one time. Being mostly not
earth scientists, we thought that the world really had a lot more
granite, and salt, and sandstone than anything else. But it turns out
that four-fifths or so of the world is basalt. Volcanics really are the
commonest kind of rock, and the so the Test Site isn't an unusual
geologic place in that sense.
Depths of Burial, Drilling 367
The first one we proposed was Gnome, in salt, and it was

carried out, in salt, near Carlsbad, New Mexico on December 10,
1 961. Before Gnome was fired we had designed other shots; the
granite shot, and the one in sandstone, and various others. Hard Hat
was originally the medium-effects test in granite. The granite
existed at NTS, and so why not do the shot there? So it got designed
at about the same time that Gnome got designed.
Excavation was always part of the grand plan of Plowshare.
Explosive excavation is not at all new. It was, in fact, the preferred
method for excavation in swamps, and some other types of terrain,
as early as the mid-nineteenth century. The French, particularly,
did a lot of work developing high explosive excavation, and scaling
laws, and theories having to do with explosive engineering. There
was, and is, extensive literature on the subject, but it all dates from
before 1900, and so a lot of modern engineers aren't familiar with
it.
Carothers: Why wasn't there some material from after 1920,
say?
Higgins: Well, technology developed, and the efficiency of
modern machines superseded explosive excavation from an eco-
nomic point of view. When the competitor was a team of mules and
a scraper, after Nobel's development of dynamite explosives exca-
vation was much cheaper. By 1 900 that was about the end of it
however, because engines and machines got to be very good. Now
it's almost to a point where you can move hard rock with machines
easier than you can blast it to break it.
Going back to 1955, there was a surface detonation called
Teapot Ess. It was not part of the Plowshare program, but it was an
underground explosion, deep enough so the fireball would be
contained, but not the debris. As I recall it was buried at some tens
of feet, and it was about a kiloton. The purpose of that was to
understand the effects as a potential antitank weapon, and to
confirm the old French scaling curves for producing craters. Would
the scaling laws developed with dynamite work with a nuclear yield,
or asking the question the other way around, was the nuclear energy
as useful as the high explosive energy? There was quite a school of
thought that said, "A nuclear kiloton really isn't as big as a thousand
tons of TNT."
Well, the Teapot Ess explosion proved that the nuclear energy
was as efficient. To the degree one can determine from measuring
the size of the crater, it was just about as good as high explosives.
The people in the Plowshare program, starting in a few years later,
began to scale things and said, "All right, if a kiloton works as well
as a thousand tons of TNT, then how about a megaton?" And they
began to realize that things like a Panama Canal could be excavated
with explosions in the megaton and submegaton range, placed at
depths of 600 feet or so.
Carothers: I presume the original argument would be, "The
chemical explosive produces a lot of gas, so there's a push, or
pressure, from this gas which lifts and throws out material. The
nuclear explosive doesn't do that, so it won't be as effective or as
efficient in moving the dirt."
Higgins: That was the argument. That first test, the pre-
Plowshare program test, was not definitive in that particular, but the
crater was about the right size. The issue still was not settled, but
it looked as though the vaporized rock did the same amount of work
as if it had been a permanent gas. That was important from a
containment point of view, because that meant the vaporized
material contained a lot of the energy. There was a good mixing,
at least until most of the energy was in the gaseous material, and
there wasn't a lot of radiant energy left behind.
So, the Plowshare cratering program people proposed a series
of shots, like Teapot ESS, at a number of depths to confirm the
scaling curves, and to examine this business of the gas coupling at
deeper depths. 1 think the scaled depth of Teapot ESS was about
60 feet. The optimum scaled depth of burst for cratering is about
120, and so Teapot ESS was at about half the optimum depth. The
gas becomes more important as the detonation point gets deeper,
and the argument was that as you approached a scaled depth of 100
or 120 for a nuclear source the gas acceleration phase, or the gas
coupling, wouldn't be very effective. So, one of the objectives of
the early Plowshare cratering program was to confirm the scaling
curves.
First we confirmed that the old scaling curves that had been
published by the French in 1870's were valid. And it turns out
they're very precise, and they were valid for both TNT and nuclear
explosives. When we used a thousand calorie per gram high
explosive like TNT, we got the same results that the French had.
And we found that the effectof wet rock or dry sand was not all that
pronounced. There was a little difference, but all these curves
existed. By confirming one or two of them we found that we could
use all of the curves.
The real issue was how far up in yield could you go, because it's
obvious, if you think about it, that in a gravity field there is an upper
limit to the size of crater you can make. If you tried to do half the
world, it would obviously all fall back, because it's going to fall back
into the same world. It might be oriented differently, but there's
going to be no crater at all. What flies up one place will fall back
somewhere else.
The largest explosion we did was the Sedan event on July 6,
1962. It was 100 kilotons or so, at a depth of about 630 feet. That
was the optimum depth from the old scaling curves. Lo and behold!
It scaled just as if it had been high explosives. It produced a 300
foot deep crater that was essentially 350 feet in radius, and was very
close, or exactly on, the high explosive curves. That verified the
scaling curves from 1 gram to 100 kilotons, which is 10 to the 8th
grams.
The point, for containment, is that 100 kilotons at the
optimum scaled depth of burst produced the right scaled dimen-
sions for the crater. We also looked at the craters from the Pacific
surface shots, and those large yields at the surface produced craters
also of the right scaled dimensions. The inference was that when the
explosive was contained, and it produced no crater, the same logic
should apply. In other words, an explosion should be completely
contained at the same scaled depth of burst, whether the explosion
was a gram or 10 grams or 100 kilotons or even a megaton.
In the absence of gravity, in a perfectly elastic medium, the
effects of energy at a point decreases as the radius cubed. But when
you put gravity in, and say the explosion is going to be contained
in this constant force field, things change. If you include gravity,
the containment depth doesn't scale as the yield to the 1/3.
Empirically it was found that it wasn't 1/3, but more like 1/3.4.
The scaled containment depth, on that basis, was 220 feet. A
couple of high explosive tests were fired at that depth. One was in
basalt, a hard dry rock that was thought to be representative of a

portion of the hard ridge that separates the Atlantic and Pacific, and
therefore was relevant to the Panama Canal issue.
The Sulky experiment was conducted at a depth which should
have just barely produced a crater. And, it barely produced a
crater. It did what it was supposed to do, at a little less than a half
a kiloton. So, it appeared that the logic worked. What was missing
was that for containment of high explosives, or the nuclear explo-
sive, that doesn't include any of the gases. While there was no crater
produced, for the 220 scaled depth essentially all of the gases went
through cracks and came out into the atmosphere. None of the solid
material did, but from today's containment of nuclear explosives
point of view that would not be adequate. It would not adequate
from the U.S. point of view, I should say. There's a difference
between the Soviet view and the U.S. view on what containment is.
So, the 220 scaling law is useful only as saying, "Well, that
limit we know is too shallow." It certainly establishes a lower limit
to the depth of burst for containment, and in that sense it probably
is useful. If you apply it to four megatons or so, as you would for
Cannikin at Amchitka, that lower limit turns out to be a little over
a 1,000 feet, instead of 6,000 feet. Well, there's a great deal of
difference in cost between drilling a hole 1,000 feet deep and one
6,000 feet deep. That last mile, so to speak, really costs you.
Carothers: We were willing to go the extra mile.
Higgins: Yes, in spite of the evidence.
But those experiments established how shallow one might go
and not release prompt debris. I don't think anyone would have
tried it. But it does point out that as you go to larger and larger
explosions, the price of complete containment, in the sense that we
are now doing it, is quite high. I'm convinced, and I think others
who have looked at it are, that we could, if we were ever do a
megaton test again, bury it half as deep as we have done in the past,
with complete safety.
Carothers: You've been an exponent of that for some time. I
have a comment. As the yield goes up to a megaton, or even to ten
kilotons, you're burying the explosive at a depth where I doubt
there has ever been a large chemical explosion done. So, you're
extrapolating these curves, and the implicit presumption is that the
earth in which you are doing this explosion is a homogeneous earth,

so what happens near the surface is the same thing that will happen
at depth when there are layers of different materials which have
dips, and faults, and cracks.
Higgins: That is a complex issue, and there isn't a simple
answer. The criticisms and the concerns early on in all of the
underground and containment programs were that these fissures
and faults and irregularities and uncertainties in the earth would
really dominate the observed effects. In fact, as data began to
accumulate, what was found was that the wavelength, or the size of
the stress wave, and the size of these irregularities were different.
Things as small as faults offsets, and void:, and changes of material
properties apparently don't interact with the stress wave from the
explosion because it is spread out more in space and time than they
can involve. The stress wave just doesn't see them; it just wraps
around the irregularities.
While it was a very real concern, the early data have been
confirmed in a large variety of cases. Faults and fissures and
irregularities become important only in very special circumstances.
They can be important, but they have to be supplemented by other
irregularities that make the stress wave itself, and the pressure field,
irregular in such a way that they reinforce each other. I think
Baneberry is probably the best example of a lot of such effects
occurring simultaneously, and I think most people agree that kind
of interaction was involved in the Baneberry failure. I don't think
everybody agrees as to which of those things was most important.
Carothers: The importance of irregularities should vary de-
pending on the yield. In other words, if I am on the scaling curves,
burying something at the proper depth, it would seem that if I
detonate a gram or so I might be greatly influenced by some
irregularities in the medium. Now, the earth, like nuclear cross
sections, doesn't scale — the earth is just there. If I want to detonate
a gram, or ten grams, things as small as the particle size of the
medium might be very important to me. If I want to detonate a
megaton, particle size is probably completely insignificant. Put
another way, they are very small compared to the wavelength of the
stress wave.
Higgins: Exactly right. And it's one of the mistakes that can
occur if you try to do scaled models of tests at the one gram scale.
You have to be very careful to scale all of the particle sizes, and
other features, along with the size of the explosive.
When we have a nuclear explosion the wavelengths from the
explosion are in the hundred meter range, as far as the bulk of the
growth is concerned. After all, the cavity grows from the size of the
explosion, which is a meter or so, up to a hundred meters or so.
Those things that are a lot smaller than a meter, or a hundred
meters, aren't going to make a lot of difference. If you had a
hundred meter sized hole, I think there's no doubt that the
explosion would find it and go out. A one meter size hole, it's
questionable. A tenth of a meter size hole is so small that its not
going to make any difference. This is my opinion, and 1 think it's
been shown in a couple of cases. It's not going to make any
difference no matter what's in the hole, including nothing. We've
done tests many times with ten centimeter size pipes. We worry
about them because we worry how big is too big, but the evidence
is that they don't make a lot of difference.
Carothers: Well, there are some people who might take
exception to your statement. You said, "If you had a hole which was
a tenth of a meter in diameter, it doesn't make any difference what's
in that hole, including nothing." There was a period of time when
you chemists drilled holes, not quite that small, but still much
smaller than a meter, near events, and filled them with various
things at various times, including drilling mud, nitromethane, and
starch.
Some of those holes stayed open. Take Eel, for example.
There were two small holes near the emplacement hole. One was
filled with drilling mud. the other with nitromethane. The mud, the
cables, and anything else that was in them blew out, and the cavity
did its best push all the gas out them. How does that square with
your statement that it doesn't matter what's in the hole?
Higgins: It does matter what's in it. I made an imprecise, and
also unconsidered statement. You can contrive to keep a tenth of
a meter hole open, but it takes some special efforts. To keep such
a size hole open isn't easy.
Drilling
Regardless of the depth that is chosen as the appropriate one
for a planned experiment, a hole must be drilled so the device and
the associated experimental hardware can be emplaced. The drill-
ing of the hole is not a containment issue in itself, but on more than
one occasion what the drillers were able to do has modified the
planned containment or experiment design. Information from the
drilling processs, should it reach the containment scientist, can
sometimes provide valuable insights as to the properties of the
medium through which the hole has been drilled. The characteris-
tics of the hole, such as its diameter and straightness constrain how
the various data colection experiments can be designed.
In 1961, when the moratorium ended, Livermore did their first
few shots in tunnels, with little success as far as containment was
concerned. Los Alamos always used drill holes, and their experi-
ence was somewhat better. One of the concerns about the use of drill
holes was that they weren't big enough to allow much in the way of
diagnostic measurements. During the first few years the holes were
36 inches, or 48 inches in diameter. While large compared to holes
that were drilled for things such as oil exploration and production,
they were a very small diameter laboratory space in which to place
the diagnostic equipment needed to collect data about the perfor-
mance of the nuclear device.
Miller: By the time I got to the Test Site the common size holes
were 36 or 48 inches, and they were doing them in one pass. In the
very beginning they would drill a small hole, similar to what they
used to do in the oil fields, then open them up with what we called
a hole opener, or hole enlarger.
Carothers: The people who were trying to make the measure-
ments always wanted a bigger hole — four, six, eight, ten feet in
diameter. Who developed what you might call "big hole drilling?"
Did we do that, or was that a commercial development?
Miller: The evolution came from people at the Test Site. The
Laboratory would give the requirements to the then AEC, and they,
of course, had drilling contractor. Holmes and Narver had the
drilling before I came out to the Site. When I came to work out there
I worked as an engineer for Fenix and Sisson, and they did the design
work for whatever was required, in conjunction with REECO. I
think the answer, probably, depends on who you talk to.
I think that initially it was probably entirely the AStE, Fenix and
Sisson, and it kind of evolved to more REECO doing it, mainly
because of personalities. It would depend on who was given the job.
We had some really fantastic people out there. One with FscS was
named Art Hodge. I'm one of the few people on earth who could
get along with him, because I wouldn't take off him. He was a mean
one, but he was smarter then anybody I'd ever known. He was that
type of guy. REECO had a guy by the name of Sim Crews, who was
a petroleum engineer. Between the two of them, reluctantly
sometimes, because FstS and REECo were always at each others
throats, similar to Los Alamos and Livermore, is how these things
developed. The prime mover, of course, was the Laboratories —
give us a bigger hole, give it to us quicker and cheaper.
Carothers: Where did they go to get eight foot diameter drill
bits? Nobody in the world used them, did they?
Miller: That's not really so. The mining industry used them
a lot, for what they called raise drilling. They mine in straight, drill
a hole down, in a drift, and then run a drill pipe in there. It's pretty
simple to drill out a twelve and a quarter inch hole in a drift. Then
they put a bit on the top, and drill up, and all the cuttings fall out
into the drift. That is called raise drilling. Then they haul the
cuttings out like they would in a regular mining operation. When
you start at the surface you have to remove the surface stuff that you
drill through, and that's the really difficult part. Raise drilling is just
one thing they use big bits for.
Carothers: What people have said is, "Well, it was really at the
Test Site where we developed big hole drilling. That had not been
done before."
Miller: That's not so. There was a guy with Robin Bits, which
sells cutters. Fantastic guy, an engineer. I heard him give a talk, and
he quoted four different localities where they have drilled big holes,
and how they progressed differently. There was the way we did it,
there was a guy from Canada who drilled some big holes, and there
was a guy in Wyoming, and somebody in Tennessee who did
something with coal mines.
Carothers: Was this so they wouldn't have to mine a shaft?

Miller: That's what they were for. It was cheaper to drill than
it was to mine a shaft with people. Everybody thinks that big holes
were only for shooting nuclear bombs in, but in Chicago, for
instance, they have a sewer system under the city, and they drilled
big holes down into places to put machinery and pumps down. In
fact, this guy with Robin, a lot of his experience came from the
Chicago area. And, of course, most of the other experience has
come from the mining industry.
So, it wasn't all that hard to get the tools if somebody wanted
to go to a six foot hole instead of a four, or an eight instead of six.
There were people in the business, and there was always somebody
who wanted to make some money, of course. We didn't go from
four foot to eight foot. It wasn't that drastic a jump. It went from
normal size drilling in the oil fields — for instance, the biggest hole
I was ever on before I came out to the Test Site was a 20 inch hole.
Then here we went to 36 inch. Of course, you drill a 48 inch hole,
and you put a 36 inch ID casing in. Then it went from a 48 to a 64,
to a 72, to an 86, to a 96. It just went a little at a time.
The biggest bit at the Test Site was for a 142 inch hole we
drilled, but we didn't drill that one on the Test Site. We bought the
two bits for one of our programs, and the only time they were used
was on the oil shale deal up at Piceance Creek, which was done by
a private contractor. The waste disposal project down in Carlsbad
used a 140 inch bit body that they extended out to 1 42 inch, which
is pretty simple to do. You just make the outside cutters, the gate
cutters, about an inch bigger on a radius, so you have a 142 inch
gauge hole. Those were two holes. Livermore never did drill a 1 40
inch hole at the Site.
I believe LASL drilled about a 1 44 inch hole to 300 feet for
some experiment about the time I came out here. But it was not a
common size hole. Of course, we had the underreamers for a while,
too.
Carothers: My recollection is that we never had a lot of luck
with underreamers.
Miller: Oh, we did. It was difficult to do, but we did several
underreamed holes. I think probably about the last one we did was
an underream up in Area 2, and that reamer is still there. They
never did get it out of the hole.
Carothers: I remember that. Fred Beane was the Test

Director. He came and said that this thing was like an umbrella —
you put it down when it is folded up, then it would open up. Then
you'd turn it, and it would make a big hole down there. So, one day
he came in to see me, and said, "We can't get it closed. Must be
a rock in it, or something. Can't get it out of the hole" What really
happened?
Miller: Well, it started off in a hole in Area 2. The requirement
was for 40 feet of 1 44 inch diameter hole at the bottom. So, we
drilled a nice 60 inch hole and set a complete string of 48 inch
casing. We put that in, and ran the underreamer in. It ended up
that there was a square hole at the bottom.
What happened was that 40 feet a is pretty long section to
underream, and the underreamer got to oscillating. When it did, the
arms, because it was pneumatic pressure that held them open,
started doing their deal as they rotated, and it just amplified it as
they went down. Each cut it made, it spiralled. I didn't know how
I was going to explain that hole to people.
Those underreamers were very expensive. It took a big piston
and a lot of air pressure to force those arms open, and we were using
the drill pipe as a conduit to pressure those arms. We would drill
the hole, and enough extra hole, which we called a rat hole, so the
cuttings would just fall in there. We'd let them fall. If there got to
be too many, we'd pull the underreamer out, go back in, and clean
out the rat hole.
The one we lost was not because of a rock. I didn't know it until
after we shot it off, but the guy who built it, another one of those
exceptional engineers, who worked for an outfit in LA, and did a lot
of things for us told me that the specs originally called for T-l steel
on the arms. Somebody in DOE saw the cost of it, and changed it
to some other kind of steel that wasn't as strong. This was an
underreamer with sixteen foot arms, and when those arms opened,
they bent. If it had been stronger steel it would probably have been
all right. The arms folded up into a grove, but they bent a little bit.
So, they wouldn't go back into the grooves, and that is what
happened.
Carothers: I remember Fred Beane coming in and saying,

"Can't get the underreamer out. Can't get it closed. Schedule, and
all this, and all that." And I remember saying, "Well, shoot it off."
Miller: One of the hardest things 1 ever had to do was shoot
that off, but I shot it off. That was a half a million dollar tool. That
was terrible. I've made a lot of hairy decisions, but I'm the one who
called Fred Beane, and then he probably called you. I said, "We're
not going to get this thing out of here. You might as well make your
head up to that. He said, "Well, what are you going to do?" I said,
"There's only two things to do, and that's abandon the hole, or,
shoot the damn thing off." A n d it was cheaper to shoot it off than
to lose the hole.
Carothers: Well, the cost of what's done for containment is
something people in containment get hassled about every now and
then — all those cable gas blocks, all those logs that you have to run
in the hole, all this, all that. Then people eventually come to their
senses, and say, "Well, compared to the cost of the hole, all those
things don't cost very much." If you say, "I've got to have the
hole," then adding the cost of the rest of this stuff is no big deal.
Miller: The fact is that all the things we did in the holes for
containment didn't amount to all that much cost.
Of course, the straight and plumb hole requirement was really
a challenge for us, but that had nothing to do with containment; that
had to do with diagnostics.
Carothers: Yes. Once upon a time we wanted to do some
measurements where the emplacement pipe was to be straight, and
just hang down in the hole like a plumbbob. So, we said we wanted
a straight hole, and you gave us a straight hole. You said, "That hole
is so straight you can look from the top down to the bottom, and
you'll find that the bottom is only off about two inches from the
t o p . " We said, "Yeah, but our pipe won't hang in that hole, because
it's slanted." And then somebody, probably you, said, " O h , you
want a plumb hole. Why didn't you say so. You just said straight."
Miller: Yeah. I remember that hole. It was U2v. In fact, I

was working for Fenix and Sisson when that requirement came for
that first straight hole. You said straight, and assumed plumb.
Carothers: Well, of course.
Miller: We drilled a twenty-two hundred foot hole that had a

seven foot displacement at the bottom, and it was a line-of-sight.
So, "What's your problem?" "Well, we meant straight down." 1
said, "Well, that's a different story." Anyway, we got so we could
do that.
Another thing that happened with drilling, and it happened on
that event that leaked - - Riola. We drilled into that thing to take
pictures of the old emplacement hole, and missed it the first time.
And that brought up something people ought to know, and we know
it at the Test Site now.
Carothers: It was only a couple of hundred feet down.
Miller: It was more than that, but you're right, it wasn't very
far down. Anyway, we missed this eight foot target down there. We
did everything we could think of to do it right. Here was everybody
out there, including the containment people who wanted to take a
picture of what was down there, and we missed it.
Then I did something that I very seldom ever did. I'd been up
damn near four days straight, and I said, "To hell with it." The
whipstocker, the directional drilling engineer - - Robert Thompson
had the contract out there - - said, "We hit it." I said, "You couldn't
have. It's an empty hole." He said, "Well, you've got to believe
your figures." I said, "Not if they're wrong." Anyway, he got mad.
He'd been up a long time too. We had a little screaming match, and
I told the driller to pick up.
Then I said, "I want to set that Dyna Drill at 160 degrees left,
and we're going to drill until we hit that thing." So, the directional
drilling engineer got mad and said, "To hell with you. I'm leaving."
I said, "Bye." Anyway, I picked it up and started drilling. I could
do the directional drilling work myself.
The partner of the guy who got mad at me came out and said,
"What are you doing?" I told him what I was doing. He said, "You
tell me exactly what you want to do, and I'll do it for you. You don't
have to do it. You're paying me to do it." I said, "Fine." So I picked
up and he drilled it, and I was sitting there looking at that weight
indicator. The whipstocker was in telling a guy in the doghouse,
"We'll be here until Christmas, and we won't get that thing." it
wasn't thirty seconds later it fell in. Hit it dead center. I thought
I was basing this on knowledge, but it was just pure unadulterated
luck. Well, you've got to depend on something, sometimes.
What people should remember is that the reason we missed it

was because we were using the magnetic declination of sixteen
degrees. We'd been using that for a long time, and we had known
we had missed some targets before. But, we never had the type of
surveying we had on this one. Usually it wasn't all that accurate.
Anyway, we got to checking back, and I called HST.N that night and
said, "What is the declination we should be using?" "Sixteen
degrees." And I said, "Yeah." Well, you go back to when the NTS
first started, and all the charts out there, all the quads, say sixteen
degrees east declination, but in real fine print it says, "Varying
easterly three minutes per year."
If you stop and figure it out, over those years it had changed
a degree and a half, and everybody was still using sixteen degrees.
Three minutes a year is nothing. But over twenty years, you ended
up with a degree. Anyway, based on that we started taking a
magnetic declination at each location. And it actually varied a little
bit across the Test Site. That shows how you can get in a rut.
Carothers: When you first came to the Site both Livermore and
Los Alamos were using holes that were cased all the way down. How
do you do that?
Miller: Well, this is similar to the oil fields. The only difference
is that in the oil fields the pipes screw together, just like the pipe you
use to emplace the device. Same kind of pipe. It screws together,
and it goes pretty fast. When you get to the bigger diameters, you
have to weld each section together. Those sections are 30 to 40
feet long. The string is supported by a strongback, and the next joint
is picked up by what we call elevators, and put in and welded. Then
you pick the whole thing up and lower it down so you can put on
the next joint, and so on until you finally get to the bottom. It took
a lot of time, and my time, which I was paid for, but I thought it was
ridiculous.
Now, when you get to holes that go below the water table you
have to do that if you want a dry hole. You do the same thing of
welding a string of casing together. Of course, the bottom piece has
a plate welded across the bottom, and so as the string goes down the
water supports it to some extent. Actually, you put water in it to
get it down, but after it's cemented in you bail that out.
Carothers: After a few years somebody at Livermore said, "We

don't need to case them." How did you feel about that? Did you
think that made any sense?
Miller: I can remember when that happened, and I thought
that was great. I thought we wasted so much money out there it was
sickening to me. And 1 still believe that. Not casing the holes saved
the Test Program so much money.
Carothers: Many millions. But the argument always was that
you had to case them, because otherwise you might be lowering a
device downhole, and the sides of the hole might slough in, or
something like that. Did you believe that?
Miller: Oh yeah.
Carothers: Well, then why in the world did you think we should
not case them?
Miller: Well, as 1 remember it, there was a lot of discussion that
went on about it. I didn't really think cave-ins were going to
happen, because we could repair the hole when we were drillling it,
and we did. A bunch of them caved in ahead of time, and we
repaired them. The ones that were really bad we cased. But, holes
do slough. Fortunately, one never has yet with the device in there.
But I'll tell you, being out there on a downhole and hearing rocks
falling in is a little discouraging. It happened all the time.
Carothers: How did people get up the nerve to try it?
Miller: I don't know who originally did, but I think it was not
people, but a person — Charley Williams. He'd just become Test
Director. I was still working for Fenix and Sisson, and Walt Johnson
called me up and said, "How about an uncased hole? Do you think
it'll stay open?" I said, "It depends on where you put it." I was all
for it. Casing was a time consuming experience.
I'm not sure whether the first one was 1 Od or 1 Ow. In fact,
I think the first uncased hole, and the hole with the first device put
down on a pipe, was the same hole, on the Test Site. I think that
at Hattiesburg they might have emplaced the device with a drilling
rig, and Rex was another one they did.
Carothers: Well, uncased holes have been used successfully
many, many times.
Miller: Yes. But a lot of those holes sloughed ahead of time,

and we'd repair them by cementing up the sloughing zone and
drilling back. You would never have used them without doing that
Carothers: It was a long time before Los Alamos started to use
uncased holes.
Miller: Oh yes. They were dead set against it, and I never
understood it, especially on Pahute Mesa where you have essentially
competent ground. There are very few caving zones on Pahute
Mesa. Some, but not like Yucca Flats.
Scolman: Our going to uncased holes was largely based on
Livermore's success in shooting in uncased holes. It saved a lot of
money, but our field engineering group was dragged into that
particular regime kicking and screaming. For a long time the
argument was, "Well, Area 3 alluvium is not like Area 9 or Area 2
alluvium."
Carothers: "It's loose, it's unconsolidated, and it's going to fall
in."
Scolman: Yes, and there's something to be said for that. It is
indeed different. But it turns out that yes, you can drill it, and the
hole will stand. On the other hand, if you will look at many of the
so-called Los Alamos uncased holes, they're uncased for a pretty
small fraction of their total depth. We tend to run an intermediate
casing, as we call it, in many cases through the alluvial layer, all the
way, and then we case when we get below the water table. So there's
a relatively short section that is uncased.
Carothers: Certainly holes do slough. A hole is drilled to some
total depth, and when checked sometime later it's ten or twenty
meters shallower. I don't think anybody knows whether that
material fell in pebble by pebble or as a hunk of stuff. That would
make a difference if you were halfway downhole when it decided
to slough.
Scolman: Test Directors worry about such things. You're
probably aware of one that we had slough immediately after drilling,
which came all the way to the surface. Luckily, it did not go up the
hole, and so the surface depression was actually to one side of the
drill rig. It did slough all the way to the surface. It was in Area 4,
and it was within the last five years.
Miller: There were two of them that did that. The first one
was an uncased hole that was drilled to like a thousand feet. They
were getting ready to use it, and went over there, and there's a
doggone collapse crater. There's the emplacement hole, and right
next to it is the collapsed area. The thing caved in, all the way to
the surface.
The one they don't like to talk about is the one that occurred
with the drilling rig on it. Everybody tried to keep that quiet,
because if certain safety people heard about it, who knows what they
would have done. What happened was it collapsed underneath the
rig, under part of the sub-base, while they were drilling. They
hauled trucks in there with gravel; several truckloads; I never did
find out how many. They filled it back up, and gently moved the
rig off, and abandoned the hole.
The result of that was a meeting just between the drillers; there
wasn't anybody else involved in it. I was in some of the meetings.
What can we do about it? And I won't mention any names, but one
LASL guy said that they were thinking about putting an expanded
metal mat all over the location, so if it happened again the
roughnecks wouldn't fall in it.
Then Fred Huckabee, who is an old driller - - he used to be a
tool.-pusher on one of our post-shot rigs - - he looked at me, and sort
of made a face, and he said, "I'll tell you what. I used to roughneck,
Miller used to roughneck, and I think he feels the same way. If my
driller brought me out to a rig and it had this expanded metal all over
everything I'd have to ask him what it was for. And he'd tell me,
'In case the ground opens up, that's to keep you from falling in it.'"
He says, "1 wouldn't have worked another minute for that driller.
I would have left." And Huckabee really got mad. He was serious,
and he said, "We don't want to start any crap like that, because that
tells you that it's unsafe to do what you're doing. You're putting
a safety net like for somebody from the Circus Circus - - in case he
misses his grip he's going to fall in the safety net. You don't want
to do that with a drilling rig."
So there were two events where that happened in the LASL
area, and after those things happened, if they had an emplacement
hole, and had a shot nearby, they would Fill the thing all the way
back up with stemming material. Shoot the shot, and go back and
de-stem the hole. Suck the stuff out. Like re-drilling it, essentially.
Carothers: Didn't they do it with something like a big vacuum

cleaner?
Miller: Yeah, but it takes a drilling rig. It was a design by this
guy Art Hodge, for the Snubber event LASL had, where they were
going to de-stem this sand stemming in the shaft and reenter it. We
used it in Area 7 during the accelerated program when the
stemming slumped and tore the cables loose. We went out there and
worked all night, and used the same string to de-stem it so they
could get down to repair the cables. So, that's the reason LASL did
that. They didn't want to lose any more holes. They figured the
one that occurred without the drilling rig on it was caused by a
nearby shot.
Carothers: This doesn't have to do with drilling, but I'll bet
you were involved in it. There were a couple of occasions where we
had cable breaks downhole, and we built cages and put people
downhole to fix them. Do you recall those?
Miller: Oh yeah. I guess about the worst one was ]orum. It
was uncased, but they didn't have to put people down on that one.
On Jorum, all the device and diagnostics was in like a submarine,
because the shot was in an uncased hole below the water table. The
stemming material from the device up to the top of the water was
these real beautiful, round beach pebbles - - rounded so they
wouldn't abrade the cables. But, they tore the cables loose, and
broke the tape and the kellum grips anyway. They saw that with the
TV. That was the first time 1 learned what a tremmi pipe was. We
ran a string of pipe in, to the water table, and did the rest of the
stemming into the water through that pipe.
I went down one hole, on Flax. Tubing fell in on that one, and
it was an uncased hole. They had pre-run it to put in some CTE
plugs. The stemming loads pulled one of the strings of tubing out
of the bracket, and it made a God-awful mess down there. The top
of that fish was about eight feet below the conductor pipe, and it was
parted in two more places down below. We designed a fishing tool
to go in and grab the fish that was across the hole, and an arm that
would go out and grab the other one.
For the top one they sent Joe Dehart and I down. All I had to
do was to latch these elevators on to the pipe, and it was sticking
straight up, but it took three days to write the safety notes to send
us down there. On the safety note it said, "Under no circumstances
will people be lowered below the conductor pipe." I read that and
said, "Can't do it. The top of the fish is eight foot below the
conductor pipe." "Well, we know that, but we won't get this
approved unless we say that." When I said, "Well, I don't
understand," they said, "Well, that's just to satisfy all the safety
people, and the powers that be." Everybody involved in it knew we
had to do it.
So, we went down below the surface conductor, and 1 latched
onto that fish. We had sound powered phones to the surface, and
joe Dehart, who was a big ironworker superintendent, said, "Hold
on there. Take off those phones." So we took the phones off. He
said, "You see down there?" And I said, "Yeah, it's about sixteen
hundred feet to the stemming." He said, "It took three days to write
this damn safety order." I said, "So? What about it?" He said, "I'll
send one of my ironworkers up in a bosuns chair on the jib of a 4600
crane a hundred feet, and I don't have to have a safety order. If he
falls out of it and hits the ground, what's going to happen to him?"
I said, "He dies, probably." And he said, "What happens to us if
we fall out of here and fall sixteen hundred feet?" I said, "We die."
He said, "What's the difference?" I said, "That's easy, Joe. They
can produce your ironworker's body. It's going to be difficult to get
our bodies. That's the only difference. The only difference." He
said, "Put your phones on. Let's go up."
Carothers: As I remember, there was a man who fell into one
of the holes up on Pahute, all the way.
Miller: Only to the water table.
Carothers: Well, that's a pretty high dive.
Miller: That's the only person I've ever known to fall into an
emplacement hole. A laborer fell into a rat hole where we had put
part of the drilling gear in, and it got stuck. They just lowered a rope
and pulled him out. I think he was down about twenty feet. Scared
the dickens out of him.
Carothers: People have said, "Well, we'd never do Baneberry

again. We won't do that. The drilling history all by itself would alert
us." I remember that there was lot of work and cementing and
drilling and trying to get that hole down to depth. Could you tell
me what went on there?
Miller: That was U8d. Weil, up there in that area there is a

clay zone, apparently. The geologists tell me that when water,
which is the fluid we use, wets it, it starts caving in. For a month
or so - - maybe not that long, but it seemed like a long time - - we
would drill a little bit, and it would fall in. And we'd go and put a
cement plug in, the worst way you could put a cement plug. You'd
like the hole to cave in cleanly, and then go and cement through the
zone from the bottom up. You can get an excellent job that way.
But when you can't get it cleaned out, you have to get a little bit
going from the top down, and I don't know how many times we did
it, but several times. What they finally did was, I think, they raised
the working point on account of our difficulty in drilling.
Carothers: We raised it forty feet. I'm the one who did that.
My Test Director, Fred Beane, would come in and say, "Well, they
had another collapse. But, they cemented it up, and they're going
to drill it out." The next day it was, "Well, it fell in again." And
it went on and on. Finally I said, "Fred, how deep is that hole now?"
He said however deep it was, and 1 said, "You know, that's deep
enough. That meets the overburden criterion. It's not what we said
we wanted, but it's good enough. If you quit messing around with
that hole, do you think we could use it?" He said, "Well, I think so."
So I sent out a TWX, and we took out just one joint of pipe. That's
where the forty feet came from. I've always wondered if we'd had
that extra forty feet if it would have held just a little bit longer, and
maybe it wouldn't have come out. I don't know.
Miller: Let me tell you something else that happened there that
I never will forget. During that process I used to go to Livermore
every Monday morning; they had regular Monday meetings during
that time. After the decision was made to raise the working point
I was in Fred Beane's office. After I'd leave that meeting I'd go to
his office, because I really worked for him, in a way. Ralph Chase
and Fred Beane and I were sitting there, just talking, and Billy
Hudson and Cliff Olsen came in there, and they were really upset
about raising the working point. They said, "We're going to
recommend against it, and we're going to put it in writing." Fred
came about half out of his chair, and he said, "You go ahead, and
I'll say 'NO' in writing." They turned red and walked down the hall.
When Baneberry went up in the sky I kept thinking about that.
The fact is I recommended we abandon that hole sometime

before all that. Not on account of I was afraid it was going to vent,
but because of the drilling problems. It was costing a hell of a lot
of money. It was terrible.
Carothers: Raising the working point wasn't one of the
smartest thing I ever did, probably. But 1 was the AD for Test then,
and somebody had to say what to do.
Miller: Well, it's your fault then, whatever you do.
Carothers: Yeah, that's right.
Miller: Well, it was my fault too, because I couldn't drill it
deep enough. We could have got it deeper, but we wouldn't have
got it shot before Christmas. A lot of the times that seemed like the
controlling factor; it was getting to be too close to Christmas.
Carothers: We didn't want to have people down there over
that time. They want to come home too.
Miller: Well, there were a lot of shots over the years that had
happened the week before Christmas, and people forget that the
post-shot drillers always worked through Christmas. Nobody ever
thought about that.
Carothers: That's true. Was post-shot drilling your bailiwick
too?
Miller: Yes.
Carothers: Now, in the early days we'd shoot the shot, and it
would collapse, usually. If it did they'd bulldoze a road down into
the crater, move a rig down to the bottom of the crater, and they'd
drill straight down.
Miller: That was pre-Cambrian time. That was before me. I
wouldn't have liked that.
Carothers: What's wrong with that?
Miller: Well, the worst drilling conditions a drilling engineer
can dream up in his wildest nightmares exists down in a chimney.
When you go back in from outside of the chimney, most of your
drilling is essentially in undisturbed ground. You don't get to the
chimney until you get to the chimney edge. And normally,
fortunately, most times you have enough overburden pressure to
help you pack the ground so it doesn't slough in. Not always, but
most of the time, you have very little trouble. But if you start at the
top of the chimney and drill through the chimney all the way down,
it's just horrible conditions. Back in those days I would not have
done it. I would have quit. They didn't even use blowout
preventers.
Carothers: What do you need those for?
Miller: Well, if you like to breath radioactive gas, I guess no
reason. I've reviewed lots of histories of when they did things like
that, and there were all kinds of problems. To investigate a chimney
for a containment scientist would be no problem, because we'd
probably do it six months or a year after the event. But doing post-
shot drilling rapidly to get fast-time samples for the radiochemist is
a different thing. I'm not talking about the drilling. The drilling
problems are going to remain. I'm talking about the radiological
problems.
Carothers: One of the things that interests people in the
containment world is, what is the condition of the rocks in the
chimney. They don't think about it in terms of drilling; they think
about it in terms of shooting another shot pretty close by. You said
that if you start to drill down from the top, you've got probably a
lot of loose, broken rock. You lose circulation. I can understand
that at the very top of the chimney, but as you get down a ways isn't
that rock pretty well consolidated?
Miller: No. I don't think so. I don't have that much
experience drilling in the chimney, so some of these things are what
I believe. Ifitcollapsedinonebigplug, all at once, instantaneously,
naturally you probably wouldn't have that much difference. But if
it did the slow caving thing, until it finally built up to the surface,
it would be different.
When they drilled back right after the shot, I don't know how
you could have learned anything about the chimney, the way they
pumped tremendous volumes of mud in the hole to try to get the
cuttings away, and contain the radioactive gases. I don't see how
a person could get any knowledge from any of those holes.
Carothers: People have told me that they have mined back in

the tunnels, and that there was at least one time when they mined
right through where the working point was, and you couldn't tell
when you hit the chimney. It was just competent rock all the way
through.
Miller: They have actually mined back to GZ. But you can tell.
The one I did you could see. I went up there with Walt Nervik and
Ken Oswald, because they wanted to get some radiochemical
samples. They actually went up to the wall with a pick, and got the
radioactive glass. You could tell where the cavity edge was, because
this cavity had formed, and the rubble had come in there. There was
a definite difference from one of the tunnel beds tuff into that
rubble zone, at least on the one I saw. There was a difference.
Carothers: When you do a drillback, how do you know when
you hit the chimney?
Miller: Well, there's several things. I always felt very
comfortable out there on a post-shot drilling rig until we got close
to the chimney, then I always was sure things were going to start
happening. There were some of them where we would drill into the
chimney edge, drill fifty feet, and get stuck. When we get to what
we call the chimney rubble, it's rock that's being pressed together
by the overburden, and when we put drilling fluid in there, things
happen down there. Sometimes things pretty bad.
One morning in Area 20 we were drilling along, and we were
into the chimney. About six o'clock in the morning I thought a
truck had run into the trailer I was in. I ran outside, and everybody
was running toward GZ, because they thought it had collapsed.
Anyway, I started to go over there, and I couldn't see any dust. The
driller said, "Don't go up there, come up here." We never did get
the drill pipe out of there. We'd had an underground collapse and
the pipe was stuck at the chimney edge, the theoretical chimney
edge. We always figured the cavity radius had gone straight up,
because we had no other thing to go on. That's where the pipe was
stuck, and that's where we shot it off. That happened several times.
Things happen down there in that chimney that don't happen before
you get to it, and they're all bad for drillers.
Carothers: I have heard that one of the reasons they went away
from drilling straight down, to the angle drilling, was that there was
a shot which had not collapsed, and the geophones were quiet. So
they moved a rig in, they were drilling, and all of a sudden the drill
stem droped about sixty feet. Have you heard that story?
Miller: Yes. I know what hole it was, and I know the guy that
was there. What happened was, there was no collapse, but they
moved in two rigs forty feet from the GZ, one on each side. They
really crammed the rigs in together in those days. They used two
because usually one of them never got to total depth. Even down
in the crater a lot of times they would use two rigs because it
increased your chances for success.
Anyway, they set the surface casing at about eighty feet on
both rigs, but one rig broke down. They drilled with the other one
to, I'd say, thirty feet below the surface casing and the tools just fell
in the hole. Well, everybody says, "It's fixing to collapse. It could
collapse." So, everybody evacuated the rig. The rigs were still
sitting there. It was Tiny Carroll who said, "I want volunteers to go
in there and tear those rigs down." Now, who is going to tear a rig
down except the roughnecks? There's nobody else qualified. So the
roughnecks went in and tore the rigs down and hauled them out.
That's one of the reasons they went to angle rigs, but the main
reason was that you can drill from the side and be in undisturbed
rock most of the time. You stay out of the chimney, so it was
quicker, easier, and had more chance of success. You didn't have
to build the road down in the crater. And we could preset the
surface casing and have that all done ahead of time, which you
couldn't do in the crater. Angle drilling was just like a discovered
America for post-shot drillers. It was that kind of a step forward.
Drill bit.
iiSS^^^^W^Ki
Drill rigs at the bottom of a subsidence crater,

drilling to obtain samples for radiochemical analysis.
391
15
Emplacement Holes
Stemming, Plugs, And Cable Blocks
Let us suppose a location has been selected for an event. It is

far enough from permanent installations such as roads and power
substaions that the ground shock won't cause damage. In consulta-
tion with the USGS, information about the geologic setting is
examined to insure there are no anomalous features which might
compromise containment. A hole is drilled to a depth appropriate
for the yield of the device, and logs are run to confirm that the
formation is as expected. The device and the diagnostic instruments
are lowered into the hole together with their attached cables. Since
this is a simple event, there is no line-of-sight pipe extending from
near the device part way or completely to the surface. In this
idealized scenario none of the many things that can occur to make
life difficult for the field people and the containment people have
happened. Everything so far looks good.
Except . . . a hole perhaps eight feet in diameter and several
hundred feet deep has been put into the geologic medium that
appears to be well suited to contain the projected detonation and its
radioactive by-products. And, some tons of metal and other mate-
rials have been placed at the bottom of the hole. There are perhaps
a hundred or so cables that carry diagnostic data and firing signals
running from the working point to the surface. Now the problem is
to make the emplacement hole and cables no easier a path to the
surface for gases than the the undisturbed medium. The hole has to
be filled with something, and filled in such a way that the cables are
not damaged or broken. Loss of data due to a broken diagnostic
cable is not a trivial matter, but it can usually be tolerated, and
perhaps the desired information obtained on a subsequent event.
Loss of the cables that carry the firing signals to the device is quite
another matter, and creates a very serious problem. And that has
happened due to poor stemming methods and badly chosen materi-
als.
The cables themselves, individually and collectively, are a

problem, even if undamaged. It has been demonstrated many times
that gas entering the broken and open end of a coaxial or multi-
conductor cable can, under modest driving pressures, travel inside
the outer insulating jacket of the cable for hundreds of feet. Cables
are round, and bundling together a hundred or so round cylinders
about an inch in diameter leaves many open channels for gas flow.
Many of the small seepages that were reported on the events in the
sixties occurred through the cables and cable bundles.
Finally, when the stemming material is emplaced, you want it
to stay there after the shot has been fired. Where could it go? Into
the cavity, of course, and it has happened that stemming material
has fallen from the emplacement hole into a cavity that did not
collapse for some time. Or, it could fall into the apical void that
typically forms at the top of a collapse that does not reach the
surface, leaving an open path for gas transport.
Faced with such problems in emplacement hole stemming, Los
Alamos and Livermore have taken different approaches to solving
them.
Carothers: Bob, how did the Los Alamos stemming plan
evolve? You started with just pea gravel and cal-seal.
Brownlee: Well, remember we started out in 1957 only trying
to cut the fallout down. We saw the efficacy of plugs, because if we
put in a plug somewhere, that did a pretty doggone good job. One
of the tests we did was to have just a plug half way down in the pipe
— nothing else. Then we did one with a plug that sat just a little ways
above the bomb. Same kind of plug, but it did a much better job.
It really cut the stuff down. We said, "Well, that makes sense. If
you hold it in, it's going to blow a bigger hole because it can't go
up, and it will get rid of more energy right there in place. And that's
a good idea." That's how we got started.
Then we came to ' 6 1 , and we said, "All right, we want to put
a plug down low." And we had discussions about the stuff that was
coming out. "How is it coming out? How are we measuring it?"
Well, we were not measuring it so we could distinguish between
whether it was coming out through the stemming or whether it was
coming out of the cables. We didn't really know. So we went with
hand-held meters to a cable, and it was hot. Well, it was coming out
of the cables, and it was coming out of the stemming too.
Emplacement Holes, Stemming, Plugs, and Cable Bolcks 393
So we put some cal-seal on top of the hole. What if we put

some cal-seal lower down, and kept the gas down lower? "Well, the
gas is in the casing of the emplacement hole, and it doesn't matter
where you stop it. Besides, you have the ground shock, which will
just break the cal-seal loose from the side of the casing and the gas
will come on up anyway." It wouldn't do that if the casing had a
good, clean, dry wall, and wasn't all covered with rust. So we did
some experiments, not at the Test Site, of pouring grout in iron
casings that had not been cleaned out, and ones that were cleaned
out. We did this all very slowly — when I tell the story it sounds
more logical than it really was, but these questions kept being
addressed.
We finally decided to try some fines, some finer grained gravel.
Okay, some fines. What if you just gathered up some surface
material and dumped it down there? Would that do a better job of
holding the gas down? 1 think 1 came across the philosophy very
early that the farther down the hole you can keep stuff, the better
off you are. So, instead of putting cal-seal at the surface, let's put
it down in the hole. Well, the moment we started talking about
pouring cal-seal downhole, the J-6 engineers had massive hemor-
rhages. "That can't be done. Impossible. And besides the cables
will have leaks, they'll get water in them, and we won't get any
data."
Okay, let's get away from the cal-seal. Let's just put in some
fines material as a plug, and see if that helps. Yes, it seems to. How
many of these fines plugs do you have to put in? It all depends on
the shot. Now, this business of "it all depends on the shot" means
that you have to tell the engineers in the field to do something
different each time, and we all know that they rarely have the mental
capacity for that. Therefore, what we need to do is have a standard
stemming plan. If the yield is big this thing works, and if the yield
is small that thing works. And you can always pour a little cal-seal
on top.
Then you can order your stemming by the foot, and they
understand that. You just say, "However deep the hole, just start
by putting in a fines layer, and every so many feet, put in another
one." Then they don't have to think. You don't have to give them
a magic formula for each shot, and they just have this one thing to
do.
And then you go out and discover they're cheating ! They're

not really putting in the layers at the places that you said they
should. So you read them the riot act, and they say, "But why? It
doesn't matter where they are." Well, that's sort of right, but you
say, "We've got to know where they are anyway." And so, there
evolved, finally, LASL Standard 5. We said, "Okay. You do it that
way, and we'll watch to see that you do it that way. No more of this
discussion of'Why can't it be different? Why can't it be random?'
You do it the way we said." We evolved to that, and it worked fine.
So, the reason why our Los Alamos Standard 5 stemming plan
had such a perseverance was because we never happened to
challenge it in a way that required us to make any change. And
therefore it lasts to this day.
But, if you look very closely, you'll find that we have the
standard plan, but you'll also find it's modified here and there. This
thing has actually been moved a little bit up, and the spacing is a
little different, for instance. If you look into it you'll discover that
it's not quite as standard as everybody thinks.
I think I have to say that the LASL Standard 5 stemming plan
was notably successful for our shots, which tended to be pretty
much the same, in the sense that there was a time when we did
relatively simple things. Livermore was doing exotic things, and so
they never knew quite what was going to happen, but we always
knew what was going to happen. The yield was not going to be more
than this much, and we could be pretty sure of that. We did things
that even if they failed, they didn't fail wrong, they failed safe.
Therefore, our stemming plan handled the things we were doing
adequately, and I think it's fair to say that is true.
As we got better the fines became different kinds of fines. The
coarse became different kinds of coarse. But, as we got the ability
to calculate these things, we discovered those fines were awfully
good. No matter how they were shaken up with ground shock they
still bonded as tightly to the casings as eyer, or to whatever, because
we did a lot of shots with casings. We discovered that by the time
the gas had gotten around very many of those layers the pressure in
the cavity had fallen, and it was all over. We had lots and lots of
those layers, not just three or four.
There's one more thing that we did different from Livermore

in the early times, which was all to our advantage. We allowed the
stemming to breathe for a long time; we'd pour some stemming in
and we'd let it sit while any trapped air came out, and pour some
more stemming in. It was very slow. We did this as much for
convenience as for understanding what was going to happen, I think.
The Livermore attitude was, "We're going to shoot tomorrow,
we're behind schedule, and so we will just dump in all the sand."
Livermore frequently worked behind the power curve. It's just that
simple; they were behind, and you could always catch up all the time
in the stemming process. Whereas, we had a schedule where,
literally, we were usually ready a week or two early. So, you could
take all the time you wanted. You stem, then you go down to the
Steak House and have dinner, and come back tomorrow to stem
some more. This allowed our stemming to solidify, and all the
breathing was gone. On the other hand, Livermore started having
collapses of stemming. The stemming would suddenly slump, and
it would tear the cables off, and it got expensive. The only reason
they changed is because it got expensive.
However, I felt that it was important to containment, and we
started arguing that you needed to get the air out of the stemming;
you've got to let those fines compact and you've got to let them
settle. So, finally, the rate of stemming became a containment
issue.
Hindsight says we had to stem slowly whether we knew it or
not, because we didn't dare not let those fines take time. As a
result, we never had any slumps of stemming. Finally, the argument
was that the reason we stemmed slowly was so we wouldn't have
slumps, but that's the engineers' argument. From the containment
point of view we were arguing you are stemming slowly because it
has something to do with containment, not just slumps. But a
slump, if it broke the cables, was very expensive.
Then we did a shaft, and now we had a great huge opening;
twenty feet by twenty feet. Now you have slumps no matter how
slowly you stem; there's a bubble there, it works it's way up, and the
stuff slumps. So, we got caught on one of the shafts where we had
a slump which tore some cables. It turned out that we were
stemming so slowly we could go down and repair it right there, so
it wasn't very expensive. You just put people down there with their
soldering irons and their pliers. In a shaft you can get to it, but it's
troublesome, because if you're stemming you've got the bomb
down there.
Carothers: Was it as surprising to you as it was to me, Tom,
that you could not pour sand down a rat hole, as it were?. And a
very big rat hole.
Scolman: Yes, and I think it surprised the people who poured
it down. We found out the hard way that it was, indeed, possible
to bridge certainly a four foot diameter hole, and probably a hole
of any diameter you want, and have the stemming fall in later. So
the thing that started first off was, "Okay, what is it that we can
really fill a hole with?" And so we came up with the requirements,
for example, of dry material and material of a certain size.
The notion of alternating coarse and fine layers came before
my time; it was in existence when I got there. My belief is that was
done so one could say with confidence that the permeability of the
stemming column was lower than the permeability of the surround-
ing medium. Remember we were mostly in cased holes in those
days. I think the ability to emplace the material was as important
a part of the criteria as the permeability. Whether that was so or
not I don't know, because as 1 said, that was folklore that was there
when 1 came.
Keller: When I came to Los Alamos in 1966 the only
interesting events were the Iine-of-sight events. We barely consid-
ered the rest of them. Charles Brown used to talk a lot about the
quality of the grout job behind the casing, but that was about the
main concern for the normal emplacement hole event. The Iine-of-
sight pipes involved the only challenging containment problems, as
far as I saw them.
Carothers: The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had been signed in
1963. A fair fraction of the events that were fired during the mid
to late sixties, of whatever nature, released some amount of activity.
Some of the amounts were pretty small, but maybe a quarter, or
maybe a third of the events recorded some amount of leakage at the
surface. Was that considered acceptable? Why wasn't Charles
Brown worried about those?
Keller: Well, you look back now and it seems cavalier, but at
the time, while any leak was disliked, the seepage of noble gases
wasn't considered a major failure. The concerns were mainly that
there would be so much flow up the Iine-of-sight pipe that you'd
have a major fallout problem from the venting. The next level of
concern was that you'd have enough radiation leakage from the
event to fog the photographic film in the recording trailers. Below
that, it was just an operational nuisance to have a leak. Hot cables
were pretty common.
But there was, even before Baneberry, a deliberate attempt to
limit the leakage to nothing. Then, as now, J-6 stemmed the holes.
And the question was whether or not the stemming would work well
enough. The LASL Standard 5 was the stemming plan for all the
shots, and it had been developed early on. It was developed partly
to avoid slumping; that's the reason the coarse materials are in
there. The coarse material is terrible stemming, if you consider gas
flow, but it doesn't slump and that was why they used so much of
it. Then they put in the fines layers, in moderation, to get some
impedance to gas flow.
The last event I worked on before Baneberry was Manzanas,
and that was the first event where Los Alamos used coal-tar epoxy
plugs. That was the hated, messy stuff that Livermore had dreamed
up, and J-6, Rae Blossom and company, were not the least bit
interested in being caught using a Livermore material. The whole
idea was abhorrent. So, I ran into a lot of resistance in trying to
design a stemming plan when I requested coal-tar epoxy plugs on
Manzanas. And yet, it was pretty clear that the stemming plan for
Manzanas would be better if it had some impermeable plugs in it
instead of just coarse and fines. So, they finally relented, and it was
used.
Carothers: Jack, Livermore and Los Alamos have always had
different stemming plans. Do you know why that is so?
House: I guess 1 would have to sum it up by saying Livermore
has been far more adventuresome in looking at different types of
stemming material and stemming plans, and to some degree I think
that is an artifact of Livermore having dedicated engineers, who are
paid to go out and look for new and different, and perhaps better,
ways to do things. Los Alamos has never had the engineering

resources to address questions of that nature, and be adventure-
some. I hate to cry poor, but this is really, to some degree, the case.
When I joined the containment business, the stemming plan
was pretty simple. It was the LASL 5, with alternating layers of
coarse and fines, with the coarse lifts always being about four to five
times longer than the fines material. They had begun using an
additional type containment feature that was known as coal-tar
epoxy, or CTE. It was awful stuff - - ultimately deemed unsuitable
for use by humans. The plan was pretty much defined, and we used
that basic plan with little, if any, alteration.
Now, that stemming plan works, and there is an element of, "If
it aint broke don't fix it." The other thing about the LASL 5 basic
stemming plan, which features the alternating layers of coarse and
fines material, is that we are very fond of the apparent attenuation
properties of the three meter thick lifts of fines that exist in our
holes, as far as slowing the gas down as it tries to find its way toward
the surface. Recently Livermore has chosen to use long lifts of
sanded gypsum concrete, and that seems to work fine for them.
Carothers: As I recall, before Baneberry one of the things that
was done about leaking cables was to go back in, cut the cables, stuff
the ends into the surface casing, and pour cal-seal on them.
Olsen: That was SOP for a long time. We started using gas
blocks not long before Baneberry; there were two or three events
before Baneberry where we had gas blocks. Those were for multi-
conductor cables, which were pretty leaky. At the time coaxs also
leaked. We were looking at how to gas block coaxs, which you could
do, but you had to use bulkhead connectors, which the experiment-
ers didn't like. We ended up manufacturing gas blocked cable, to
avoid as much as possible putting something discrete in the line.
We were also looking at cable fanouts before Baneberry. The
event which sort of tripped the whole thing on cable fanouts was
Pod. We had some downhole motion-diagnostics, and part of the
accelerometer and velocity gauge is a thermister to measure the
temperature, because the damping is temperature sensitive. We
saw, way up the hole, inside the cable bundle where this package was
buried, that the temperature went up to that of steam, give or take
a little. After a little thought it became obvious that we had nice
conduits in the cable bundle, which let the gas go straight up.
Carothers: What was the origin of the plugs? Were they

material to seal the cable bundle?
Olsen: The first plugs were on line-of-sight shots. We had
some plugs on line-of-sight shots where the plug was more a matter
of structure than containment. Usually those holes were cased, and
the plugs were there, most commonly, to tie the pipe to the casing,
to control the response to the ground motion. Los Alamos was
doing a number of line-of-sight shots too, and they started to look
into using plugs of some sort. 1 think they had a concrete plug on
Finfoot.
Then, because of the diagnostics we had, we slowly began to
realize these things were also stopping gas that was coming up the
stemming. We were looking at various things in stemming columns,
putting in radiation and pressure transducers. For stemming we put
fines in, and coarse in, and sometimes NTS dirt. Sometimes in the
sixties you would fill the hole with anything you could get a bucket
loader into.
We tried cement, and on Plaid we had a polymer plug. That
stuff, which was a sloppy, milky mixture, set up into a plug that was
kind of the consistency of a tough gum eraser. I think it was
probably one of the best plug materials we've ever had. We'd still
be using it, but it was so damnably expensive, even then. But it was
great, because it didn't fracture, and it was really tough. It wasn't
structural per se, but it did tie things together, and it stopped flow
around closures, which was the thing that we had in mind.
Carothers: There was a shot on Pahute Mesa where somebody,
who shall be nameless, had a concrete plug poured, and somebody
else forgot about exotherms, and so the cables got hot, softened and
shorted out.
Olsen: Ah yes. On Greeley and Duryea both we had those
problems.
Carothers: People learn slowly, don't they? One might
wonder why it took two times to get people's attention. It's strange
to look back on, and you wonder, "How could such a stupid mistake
be made once, and how could it possibly be made twice?"
Olsen: I agree with you, but I think it was part of the lack of
a detailed overview. There were people doing their own little thing,
and it never occurred to the mechanical, or civil engineers that the
cables could have a problem. And it never occurred to the electrical

engineers that these guys who had been dumping stemming into
holes for years would come up with something to screw up the
cables. And we did not have an overview that looked at these
interactions. I'm not sure that we still have that to quite the extent
that we should.
Carothers: Was that concrete plug for containment?
Olsen: The early things that went on, on Pahute, were kind of
funny, because some of the stemming things that went on were done
by engineers, who almost tried to second-guess containment. We
didn't design it. Some event engineer would say, "Well, containment
is probably going to want a plug, so I'll throw in a plug." So we'd
see the plan, and there would be the plug. So, okay. Not knowing
that it should be somewhere else, or whatever, we thought that was
great, that we were finally getting some respect, and they were
putting in a plug. On Pahute, where we had never had any
experience with problems, and because there were no long lines of
sight, or anything like that, we didn't really look at the stemming
very carefully.
Carothers: Something that Livermore started to use routinely
was one or more solid plugs in the stemming column, which would
support the stemming above them, and also be an impediment to gas
flow. Why did you think plugs were necessary, and start to use the
coal-tar epoxy mix?
Olsen: In retrospect that particular thing probably got its
rudiments from Scroll. After we looked at the results for a while,
we realized that we had a plug there, but the cement was in the
wrong place, and the stemming all ran into the cavity. If we had put
it in the right place we could have put in a lot less, and it would have
done a better job.
Hudson: I guess we really started worrying about plugs as
containment features in Area 2, where we had subsurface subsid-
ences, followed by, perhaps, the displacement of gas to near the
surface, through the chimney. We weren't quite sure how the gas
got to the surface, if it did. But, if it did, it seemed to occur in
several stages. During some of the earlier stages we appeared to
have radioactive gas going up the stemming column rather easily.
And so, we argued that putting in plugs to better block the flow of
gas was a good idea. Those were more for a gas block, I guess, than
they were for a stemming platform.
I don't remember just when it was we decided that we needed
a stemming platform. It was primarily driven by the idea of a
subsurface subsidence, where a significant amount of gas would be
displaced perhaps halfway to the surface, after which we might have
some, or all of the stemming fall into the void at the top of the
subsidence. Any kind of stemming fall would eliminate the imped-
ance between that pocket of gas and the surface. We wanted to
avoid that. Riola was a perfect example of where we needed a
stemming platform, and we had one that didn't work.
Carothers: I remember one occasion, and there were probably
others, before Baneberry, where there was a stemming fall. The
device went unexpectedly low yield. It was buried quite deep, and
only went about a kiloton. That left a standing cavity into which all
the stemming fell, leaving an open hole to the surface. So, I believe
stemming falls do occur. But again, the LASL argument is, "Well,
the fines bridge, and we never lose stemming."
Hudson: After starting to use instrumentation in the past few
years to monitor the performance of their stemming, they have seen
gas halfway up the stemming column, on some events, in a fairly
short period of time. They've also actually observed their stemming
column falling into the void above a chimney. Now, they will argue
that they expect the stemming to bridge; they expect the stemming
not to fall. But you may remember a CEP meeting where I asked
Wendee Brunish if they thought they could depend on that. She
said, "No, but we don't really need it anyway." So, they've lost
confidence in their stemming as being a dependable bridging
mechanism.
Carothers: The Livermore stemming has been criticized in the
last year or two on the grounds that most of the stemming is just
gravel, with a few plugs of gypsum concretein it. How did you arrive
at that kind of design? Was it based on measurements you'd made?
Hudson: I think the current design is driven more by the
philosophy of "good enough is good enough" than by measure-
ments. The only place you really block the emplacement hole is
where you're blocking the cable bundle and the cables themselves.
So, long stretches of low permeability stemming, where you don't

do anything about the cable bundle, is not effective anyway. Los
Alamos, on the other hand, has reasoned that stretches of coarse
material will give the gases a chance to get out into the overburden.
So, maybe a mix of low permeability and high permeability stem-
ming is a good idea — that was their argument.
The current Livermore plan is sort of a blend of Livermore and
Los Alamos philosophy. The only benefit that the coarse can
possibly have, from a containment point of view, is to allow the gas
to expand and come into contact with the porous medium around
it. And that may be good. If you have a continuous cable bundle,
surrounded by low permeability material, it will certainly be a much
better conduit than a cable bundle surrounded by a very porous and
permeable material. In either case we've always felt that the only
real block to the flow of gas is a location where you block everything
across the hole, including the cable bundle.
Carothers: You put the gas blocks there, the fanouts there, the
impermeable plug there, and that's presumably where the gas will
stop. Now, it has seemed strange to some people, me included, who
visualize the process as the device going off, the cavity forming, and
maybe a lot of noncondensable gases in the cavity which move out
through the medium, which has some kind of permeability. This gas
should move out more or less spherically, somewhat like a bubble,
and when it comes to the plug, which is perhaps forty or fifty square
feet in area, the surface area of that bubble is thousands of square
feet. So, the gas just flows on around the plug, so what's the use
of the plug?
Hudson: 1 think the plugs in the stemming column can only be
effective at quite early times. Certainly what's in the stemming
column can't stop what's going on outside the stemming column,
and so you're right there. Sooner or later the gas is going to travel
as a bubble, and this is probably what happens on Pahute Mesa,
where you have late-time breathing. Even though we block it in the
emplacement hole, there are enough fractures to allow the gas to
expand until it finally intersects other fractures that reach the
surface, after many hours, or days.
Carothers: Late-time seepage out of the cracks on Pahute Mesa
could be due to the fact that most of the material covering the Mesa
is the Rainier Mesa member, which was laid down while it was hot.
As it cooled, it cracked. It's several hundred feet thick, and the

cracks are not necessarily through going, but gases can move from
one to the other. In that context, that rock is almost not there to
prevent the very slow seepage of gas. It provides overburden, but
not gas blocking. Does that seem to be a reasonable scenario to you?
Hudson: Statistically it certainly seems sound. A study that
was done did strongly suggests that there is a correlation. When this
Rainier unit is exposed to the surface, certainly well over half the
time you end up with some late-time seepage, or breathing as it is
called. Whereas, when you don't have that member exposed, you
don't have that seepage. There are other circumstances from time
to time also, like rad chem drilling, which are hard to sort out. On
the Barnwell event there may or may not have been a very late-time
seep without the post-shot hole, but there is evidence that the post-
shot hole was involved in a flow of gas toward the surface. So, it's
maybe not as simple as the statistics imply. The fact that we don't
see these late-time seeps on Pahute when we don't have this material
exposed at the surface is an indicator that there's probably some-
thing to the theory.
Peterson: Something that we did for Livermore was a program
on atmospheric pumping and why gases come out of underground
shots at long times after the shot. I think it has given them a little
different picture of why gases come out of chimneys.
The history of it goes back a long way. When we did the DN A
chimney pressurization experiments, and we looked at the tracer
coming up to, say, the top of the chimney and detected it, one can
imagine that when you put gas into a chimney, the gas you're
putting in is expanding as in a balloon. If that were the case, if you
sampled at the top of the chimney you'd see no tracer for a while,
but eventually, when the balloon got up to where you were
sampling, you'd see the concentration that you were putting in.
Well, obviously this doesn't happen, because Mother Earth
isn't uniform. If we look at the results we got from the DNA
chimneys, we started detecting the tracer maybe a factor of ten
earlier in time than you would expect if were expanding like a
balloon. If we should have seen it in forty hours, we'd see it in four
hours at the top of the chimney when we had hardly any pressure
up there. In thinking about that for a while, it became somewhat
obvious that the theory that one gets gases out of chimneys just by
simple atmospheric pumping — in other words, atmospheric highs

and lows — is not the right picture. That's a driver, but that's not
why it comes out. In order to get the gas to come out you need non-
uniformities in the material, and it sort of bootstraps its way out.
1 talked to Livermore about it because I knew they were
interested in it many years ago. They thought we were crazy, or
whatever, but more recently they became somewhat more inter-
ested. So we set up an experiment with a sand column, in a
plexiglass tube, about four inches in diameter, maybe six feet high.
We had a void region at the top that represented the atmosphere,
and a void region at the bottom that would represent a cavity, for
example. The sand represented the alluvium, and you can go
through the equations and scale things so you get the relative
volumes almost correct.
The hypothesis was that if it's just atmospheric pumping in a
uniform medium, as you think of alluvium, you would get gas out.
I really didn't think you would. So we did a number of experiments.
In one of them we set it up with a uniform sand column, and we put
gas with a tracer in the bottom chamber that represented the cavity.
In another one we put gas with a tracer in the bottom, but we put
a pump on the top that would vary the pressure, as atmospheric
cycles do. Because this is all scaled one can do a lot of cycles in a
fairly short time, and we ran it for four or five thousand cycles. It
was equivalent to a thousand years of atmospheric pumping. Well,
sure enough, when we monitored the tracer up in the top volume,
the tracer concentration in the one that wasn't pumped turned out
to be exactly the same as the one that was pumped. The pumping
made absolutely no difference whatsoever.
The pumping is a driver, but you need some nonuniformities.
So, we made a second sand column in which we put one permeability
of sand in an outer annulus, and a different permeability of sand in
the center. We used a very thin aluminum pipe in the column so we
could fill the center with one sand, and the outside annulus with
another sand. We did two columns that way. We left the pipe in
one of those columns, but pulled the pipe out of the other one so
the two sands could talk to one another. Well, in the one where the
two sands could talk to one another the tracer came up very fast.
The column where the pipe was still in acted just like the one that
was absolutely uniform.
So, the whole thing on this pumping business is that you need
the atmospheric pumping, but it is the degree of nonuniformity that
exists that makes it work. It is the small fractures, or nonuniformities
in permeability, that determine how fast the atmosphere can pump
these gases out. When it is nonuniform, some gas flows up in the
fast flow paths, and as it does that it diffuses out to the side. When
the atmospheric pressure changes it can't push all the stuff that's
diffused out to the side back down. And so, on the next atmospheric
low, a little more moves up and diffuses out, and tends to stay there
during the next high. If you have a lot of these nonuniformities,
then the gas can move up quite a bit faster than if you have a fairly
uniform medium. That's a containment thing that we have looked
at and studied, and I think we found some interesting answers.
We're still doing some work on it. There are a bunch of
models, and part of the work we're doing is to look at some of those
experimental results. There is some data, and we're trying to look
at it to see whether we can characterize what the formation looks
like, and why it has done what you see that it has done. You can
say, "Gee, it would be nice to learn all these things, and then
somebody could go out and drill one drill hole, and they would know
whether that's the perfect place to do a test or not." I think we're
a long way from that. But I think you have to learn these things, and
get an understanding of what's happening, even to be able to make
the judgment as to whether you're ever going to be able to do
something like that or not.
Carothers: The things that have been done in the field since
Baneberry have essentially eliminated the seeps and leaks through
the stemming and the cables that had happened on both Laborato-
ries' shots fairly often before then. What did Los Alamos do about
the cables, for instance?
Scolman: We had been gas blocking multi-conductors before
Baneberry. After that we started gas blocking coaxial cables. And,
we pushed for the development of continuously gas blocked cables.
As I've often told people, anytime you break a cable you're asking
for trouble. For example, when you look for trouble with wiring in
your house, or car, you don't go to the middle of an existing run of
wire; you look at the connectors.
Carothers: Did you ever do cable fanouts before Baneberry?
Scolman: I don't think so. They were initially a pain until we,
and 1 think in this case until Livermore, figured some simpler ways
to do it. We did, for a while, have big three-dimensional cages
where the cables were physically separated from each other. They
were a pain to put down. And most of the time when we found we
had a cable problem going downhole, it was either where we had put
a gas block in, which involved breaking a cable and putting in a
physical connector, or going through a fanout. We made a point
that whenever we were going downhole, when we had gone by cable
gas blocks, which in general meant a fanout in the same area, before
we went any further we required a complete cable check. We didn't
want to put the device downhole and then find out we had to bring
it back later. And we did have trouble doing those things. We also
did an awful lot of experimentation to try to do things that were
probably not possible to do. One of the early requirements was that
our cable gas blocks and our plugs in the casing should be able to
handle five hundred psi. We found pretty soon that probably was
not possible.
The plugs were the problem. The cable gas blocks you can
make that good, but you can't make the plugs that good. The other
problem, of course, is that if you're going to tell somebody that a
downhole plug is good for five hundred pounds, you better be able
to test it in place. That's pretty tough to do, unless you put a pipe
down, and force a whole hell of a lot of air down there to start with.
So, that requirement on the plugs went away, but we did a lot of
work trying to do things like that.
Carothers: My impression is that Los Alamos came to the use
of plugs somewhat reluctantly. Why was that, aside from the fact
that they're expensive, messy, and a pain to emplace?
Scolman: I'd agree that it was reluctantly. We didn't really
think they were necessary. We had a body of experience that said
fines plugs were very effective. When you say 'plugs', generally
what you really mean are 'stemming platforms.'
Carothers: They're called a couple of different things depend-
ing on who's talking about them. And I suspect the people in the
field who were emplacing them called them a lot of things we
needn't mention.
Scolman: To my knowledge, at least in my time, I don't believe

Los Alamos ever claimed one of their plugs was a stemming
platform.
Carothers: Well, Tom, I have been on the CEP for many years,
and I have seen the Los Alamos presenters perform various interest-
ing verbal contortions to avoid calling them stemming platforms.
Scolman: They were directed not to do so. We did not believe
that the material being used for these plugs was the kind of physical
material that one could count on to stop a stemming fall. In other
words, coal-tar epoxy is not a strong material. It's a little bit like
asphalt.
There was some pressure for us to follow the Livermore lead
and call the plugs stemming platforms, as guards against a loss of
stemming. Our field engineering group got their backs up and said,
"Look, we're not going to tell you that it's a stemming platform
unless we do something to engineer it to be a stemming platform.
For example, put in a reinforced cage and some high strength
concrete." We did, by the way, for quite a while, put a concrete
layer under the lowest plug to protect the coal-tar expoxy from
heat. That was a bit of a push toward saying, "Okay, it is indeed
a stemming platform." At least there was protection from hot gases
being there right at that surface. But we were - - reluctant is too mild
a word - - not going to buy in to the coal-tar epoxy plugs as stemming
platforms.
Carothers: Well, you were ultimately proven to be right.
There was Riola, the coal-tar epoxy stemming platform was
challeneged, failed, and all the stemming fell out. That led to
different kinds of plugs. LANL now is using two-part epoxy, aren't
they?
Scolman: Yes. I think that was driven as much as anything by
the toxicity of the coal-tar epoxy. Plus the fact that I think it's a little
cheaper. I've forgotten the numbers, but some appreciable fraction
of the cost of the stemming material was made up by the coal-tar
epoxy plugs. And frankly, I've always considered them chicken fat
- - just something that makes you feel better. Particularly the lower
ones.
Something that has always bothered me is that 1 think if Los

Alamos, in particular, can be faulted in anyway for the containment
regime we've gotten ourselves into, it would be because the things
we do were designed for cased holes. We now use them almost
exclusively in uncased holes, and many of the things that are done
don't make very damn much sense in an uncased hole. Including
using impervious plugs in a pervious medium.
Carothers: Billy, the Livermore plugs are supposed to support
the stemming in the event that the stemming is lost beneath the
plug. Will they do that? How do you know?
Hudson: We advertise that the top two plugs, the plugs that
are forty or so feet thick, are stemming platforms. We believe,
based both on calculations and experiments, that any of our gypsum
plugs would act as a stemming platform, even if they were only
twenty feet thick. We have never seen, based on our measurements,
a gypsum plug fail as a stemming platform, even though it's been as
thin as twenty feet. But then, we've only had them challenged a
small number of times. The twenty foot plugs, I think, have only
been challenged twice.
Carothers: You mean by challenged that there has been a loss
of stemming below the plug, the plug stayed there and the stemming
above the plug stayed there, so they worked?
Hudson: Yes.
Carothers: The coal-tar plugs were emplaced by pouring the
gravel and the coal-tar in at the top of the hole at the same time,
but seperately. One of the criticisms of that process was that you
really didn't know what kind of plug was formed when those
materials reached the bottom and presumably mixed.
Hudson: That's why we now mix the material before we put
it downhole. Instead of just letting it dribble down the side of the
hole we now put it in through a pipe until it's within about fifty feet
of its final resting place. I like to describe the process we were using
in the past as like throwing gravel and cement over the top of your
house, hoping to get a patio in your backyard.
Kunkle: Brian Travis tried to model the heating and cooling of

coal-tar epoxy plugs. In Los Alamos holes this was the material we
emplaced as rigid plugs, at the time. CTE, as we knew it by it's
initials.
Carothers: Over a couple of Los Alamos engineers' dead
bodies, probably.
Kunkle: Well, that material could certainly make you dead if
you came into contact with too much of it. I was astounded when
I first got here to learn they would actually use this stuff in any field
setting.
A thing I recall from graduate school is watching a colleague,
Dave Lolley in the Physiology Department, who studied rats and rat
problems. One of the rat problems he would cause is skin cancer,
which he would cause by simply painting coal-tar onto the skin of
the rat. After a few weeks, the rat had skin cancer. So, I was sort
of shocked to find we were using coal-tar in rather large amounts at
the Nevada Test Site.
At any rate, one of the calculations that I was watching Brian
Travis do was the expected heating of the plugs - - the rise in
temperature due to the exotherm as the epoxy set, and the
subsequent decline in temperature - - as indicated by the thermisters
in the plugs. They didn't make any sense. This must have been in
July, August, September, 1980.
We could make no heads or tails of those downhole tempera-
ture measurements. A tentative conclusion we reached was that the
coal-tar and the gravel that was put into it - - it was a coal-tar
concrete - - must not have been well mixed together. There must
have been some plugs where one side was mostly coal-tar, and over
on the other side it was mostly gravel.
Each plug was different, and none of them behaved as they
should. That was a puzzlement to us. And then, it must have been
September, October, the Livermore Riola event seeped a tiny
amount of gas to the surface. That caused quite a stir, because one
of the coal-tar epoxy plugs had failed to hold the stemming material
that was above it. The plug simply wasn't there. Reentry observa-
tions showed that, indeed, it was probably never there. That is, the
stuff had been put in the ground but it had never formed into a
monolithic uniform plug.
Brownlee detailed me at that time to go study coal-tar epoxy

plugs, and the problems that were plaguing them. I dutifully took
on this assignment, and together with Billy Hudson we formed a
little outfit we called the Stemming Plans and Stemming Modifica-
tion group, otherwise known as SPASM. We investigated coal-tar
epoxy plugs, how the Laboratories were emplacing them and using
them, and how well they might be performing. This involved
pouring plugs, full-scale plugs, in a hundred foot deep hole we had,
and pulling them back up. Then we broke them apart to see what
was in them. And we found that, as the calculations had suggested,
those downhole plugs were miserable.
They were not what they were planned to be, but they had
properties similar to those you might have inferred from simple
downhole diagnostics; the temperature records. They were not
uniformly mixed. They were segregated; sometimes into layers of
nearly pure coal tar epoxy, sometimes layers of gravel, and that type
of behavior could have been inferred, and partially was inferred
from the temperature records. There were diagnostics that coal-tar
epoxy had been put down the hole, and that it was reacting, because
it had generated heat.
Carothers: It had generated heat, the temperature had risen,
and then had started down. Therefore it was setting up, and
becoming a rigid plug. 1 suspect that the people who were making
those measurements used the temperature records only to say,
"Well, see the temperature has come down and the plug is now
cured. Therefore, we can shoot."
Kunkle: That's right.
We began talking about the the replacement of coal-tar epoxy
with an alternate material. We, Los Alamos and Livermore, finally
settled on a water-based epoxy, Celanese by brand name. We both
put TPE, two-part epoxy, plugs in for a while.
This episode of switching from coal-tar epoxy to two-part
epoxy involved a lot of, "Well, let's look back through the records
and see what's actually happened on our past events." This was a
time to, quite literally, review all of our post-Baneberry under-
ground nuclear tests for how they were stemmed, what downhole
diagnostics were put in and what those diagnostics might have seen.
The thermistors were the in-situ diagnostics in the plugs and there
were sometimes something about plug performance. There were
also radiation and pressure monitors, RAMS units, instruments to

measure surface accelerations, occasionally some downhole accel-
erations - - that kind of stuff. We went through, shot by shot,
reviewing our history of Los Alamos stemming. That got me pretty
familiar with what we had done in the past, and why, and what
problems had been encountered.
Carothers: Those coal-tar plugs had been used for many years,
more than ten, at least.
Kunkle: We first put them in just before Baneberry, on
Manzanas. And before the Baneberry event we had a design for a
shot which would have some in it, but that shot was fielded after the
Baneberry stand down.
Carothers: The lesson to be learned from coal-tar plugs is that
probably during that ten or so year period all of those plugs had been
very poorly mixed. And that was okay because nobody knew it.
People would say to the Panel, "We have a stemming plan like this,
and we have these coal-tar plugs. They have been used successfully
on x-teen events." Then one day one got challenged. And it failed.
Until a feature has actually been challenged and survives the
challenge, a statement like, "Well, we're going to put in gypsum
concrete. We have used that successfully ten times," doesn't mean
very much.
Kunkle: In the pre-Baneberry era, the shots were without
plugs. We saw many small releases, but they were acceptable under
the guidelines at the time. They didn't seem to much bother
anybody, and it was fairly well understood, by at least a few people,
where they were coming from. That was flow in cable bundles and
such.
The coal-tar epoxy was introduced to stop the flow in the cable
bundles. That was it's real purpose for us at Los Alamos; at least
that's why we started using it. And it seems to have worked pretty
well at that, even if it didn't ever set up into a real plug. When we
did introduce the coal-tar epoxy plugs, and used them routinely
after the Baneberry stand-down, along with the cable gas blocks, the
small releases we'd seen near surface ground zero stopped. And so
the coal-tar epoxy plugs were quite satisfactory from some stand-
points, but they were not structurally competent to serve as
stemming platforms.
House: TPE is not the ESStH problem that CTE was in terms
of handling, and it is a much more suitable plug because it does, in
fact, become a rigid plug. There was a confirmed suspicion that coal
tar might never get hard and set up, and could, in the event of a
stemming fall below a plug, perhaps drain away. And in one
confirmed instance, it did. We have seen physical evidence in terms
of pictures provided to the Panel of just that happening. And that
event in and of itself really spurred conversion to some other type
of plug material.
TPE is, unfortunately, a far more expensive, in terms of pour
per linear foot, than Livermore's sanded gypsum concrete. But for
some reason, that I won't attempt to address, our field operations
people have been not particularly receptive to making a move to
sanded gypsum concrete. I think, cost notwithstanding, and if I
remember the Chairman's sermon, delivered more than once, cost
is not to be considered a factor in containment design, we at Los
Alamos favor the TPE because of its properties. Albeit, we are in
a process now of reducing the number of TPE plugs, and replacing
one of them with a grout mix designated as HPNS-5, which means
Husky Pup Neat Slurry, which seems to have a lot of reasonable
properties, and is far easier to emplace at great depth.
Carothers: How do you emplace the two-part epoxy plugs?
House: Two-part epoxy is emplaced in a very simple fashion.
It is pre-mixed at the surface, in a specially configured, or specially
insulated, transit mix truck. The two-part epoxy is called, by the
Celanese Corporation, Part A and Part B. Three-eights inch pea
gravel aggregate is added to it. It goes through a mixing process and
comes out of the truck, down a chute, and free falls down the hole.
At one time we attempted, I believe on the Trebbiano event, to
emplace a plug at 990 feet using a tremmi pipe. I think the field
engineering folks had a six inch tremmi pipe to pour the stuff down,
and it didn't go down very well at all. And so it was concluded that
trying to emplace it through a pipe was unsuitable, and we have
continued with the free fall method.
Carothers: Do you have any concern that there might be some
separation of the gravel and the epoxy?
House: As you watch it come out of the chute, out of the

transit mix truck, it's easy to see that it is well mixed, and the epoxy
has enough adhesive properties to pretty well entrain the gravel in
it as it goes down hole. We're talking about 3/8 inch aggregate,
which is pretty small. Also, although admittedly this isn't a free fall
sample, we do take five gallon buckets right out of the end of the
chute, and go test it. But of course, that doesn't tell you what it is
like when it gets to the bottom of the hole.
We have done experiments in abandoned or unusable emplace-
ment holes, where we have poured plugs at, say, 120 feet, and then
gone down and cored them, and done some sampling. At least at
that kind of a depth, which is essentially equivalent to the standard
location of the top TPE plug, we find them to be pretty well mixed,
far more so than the old coal-tar plugs.
Carothers: Livermore has gone through a series of stemming
plan changes. Why didn't Livermore observe that LASL has never
had a seep since Baneberry, think their stemming plan must be
pretty good, and use the same design?
Hudson: I think if we could be sure we had the same sort of
working point medium, which we probably do if we put our shots
in tuff, it probably would be perfectly okay. The alluvium in the Los
Alamos areas has been described as "more forgiving" in that their
alluvium is less cemented than most of the Livermore alluvium. In
fact, they have difficulty in drilling a large diameter hole in their
alluvium, which means that it isn't cemented as much; it doesn't
hang together.
Consequently, It's always been a question, a puzzle, why they
have historically had better luck than Livermore. Their overburden
material won't support open fractures like the Livermore overbur-
den will, and I suspect that's the main reason. In practice I don't
think it has always really been that much better. Prior to Baneberry
their release rate wasn't much different from ours. Since Baneberry
we've had two seeps, and they've had zero. What sort of statistics
are those?
There's another reason for the changes we have made. We've
always paid a lot more attention to the performance of our
stemming plans than Los Alamos has to theirs, by using downhole
monitors to see what goes on. When we saw that radiation was
getting higher in the hole than we liked, we tried to make changes

to stop it. Almost all of the time those threats - - when we had
radiation higher in the hole than we wanted - - would not have led
to a release. We were only concerned that they were an indication
of something, maybe, worse to come.
Los Alamos, on the other hand, has for the most part ignored
the performance of their stemming plans. It's only recently that
they've started fielding very many downhole radiation detectors,
for example. So, I suspect that they were fat, dumb, and happy,
while we were trying to fix things that weren't all that important.
Carothers: Well, if I were to speak on the side of Los Alamos
I could say, "We monitor the performance of our stemming plans
with the ground zero radiation monitors, and the stemming works
just fine."
Hudson: And 1 can't argue with that. If you're only concerned
with yes or no, as opposed to how and how well containment was
achieved, the statistics are such that you can't argue with them.
Rambo: We're the only ones who do a full stemming column
calculation for the vertical shots. We include the stemming column
in the calculation. For many years all we did was the outside world,
but now we put in the plugs. We have material properties for the
coarse material, and when it was sand we had that, and for a while
we were putting in the two-part epoxy plugs.
Carothers: Might that be because Los Alamos could say, "Why
do calculations? We never have any trouble with our stemming
plan."
Rambo: That was true until recently. But you can say that
about just about anything in containment. Recently they had a shot
where gases got quite a ways up the hole because some of the
stemming fell out. Before that they didn't have that kind of
problem. They thought that the fines layers were going to compress
strongly, because they showed in one of the tunnel shots that the
fines material does turn into something pretty hard. That's a
sellable argument. We ran with fines layers for a while too, in the
residual stress area, but we had some leaks past them. So we went
to sanded gypsum plugs, thinking they might be even better
material, and we've still had some leaks past those plugs. It didn't
seem to make any difference whether we had one or the other.
Carothers: It has always seemed a little surprising that a plug

would matter. In an uncased hole, when gases come to a plug why
don't they simply go around it? They can go into the native material
as well.
Rambo: Sure. And I imagine they do in many cases. The
difficulty is that once they get into the stemming, then you're
relying on man-made items to stop them before they get up to the
surface.
Carothers: Livermore uses a few long gypsum plugs in a
column of gravel. That gravel has probably a permeability of a
hundred Darcies or more. Los Alamos uses many alternating layers
of gravel and fines, rather than a lot of gravel and a few plugs.
Rambo: And what do you hear when you talk about that in our
containment group? You hear things like, "Gee, it costs a lot of
money to put in those fines layers."
Carothers: Of course it does. Almost anything you do is more
expensive than just dumping in gravel. Putting in sanded gypsum
plugs isn't free, however.
When I see a drawing of the stemming plan at the CEP, the
vertical and horizontal scales are different, so it appears that the
hole is rather short, and pretty big in diameter. The plugs appear
to be thinner than their diameter. Now, if you showed me the
stemming plan with equal vertical and horizontal scales, there would
be a long, very thin emplacement hole with a few long, thin plugs
in it. Looking at that kind of representation, the plug appears to be
just a small irregularity in the ground.
Rambo: Yes, just another rock. It is amazing, but there have
been many times when they've measured pressure below it, or
radiation below it, and not measured anything above it.
I think it also helps to put a plug in the so-called residual stress
field, because you've compressed all this material, and flow may
indeed stop there. The cavity pressures that they've measured seem
to be decay and reach a plateau where they sit for quite a while.
That suggests to me that there is leakage, but not at a horrendous
rate, but of course shots are different in this regard. The pressure
in the Cornucopia cavity, which was fired in a fairly weak material,
sat there for a number of hours before it finally decayed all the way.
It was down around twenty bars, which is fairly low, but it was still
there for a fairly long time.
It's enough to say there's something there that isn't letting all
the cavity gases go out immediately. There hasn't been enough data
to put the whole story together yet, but there may be something
there. If we could see more data, perhaps we could see that in a
weaker material there is something which happens, or doesn't
happen, so the gases are held in for a while.
There were shots, like Roquefort and Coso, where calculations
showed them close to the margin, and they had radiation high in the
stemming column. I think one of the failures in this business is that
when we have radiation up the stemming column, very seldom is
anything ever done post-shot to look at why that happened. And
without ever looking at that you're doomed to keep repeating it.
You never learn anything unless you stop and take stock, and say,
"Why don't we learn something about this?" The constant state-
ment is, "Well, it contained." But by how much? And what did you
learn from that? That part of the process is dead.
Carothers: I can't remember any significant post-shot explo-
ration in the past few years.
Rambo: That's right. Anyway, there is this realm of calcula-
tions that shows things on the margin sometimes. I'm not sure it was
totally residual stress, but I looked at Roquefort after I had
presented it to the CEP, and I said, "Look, there are some
weaknesses around the top of the cavity." 1 told the containment
scientist, "It looks to me like you could get something into the
stemming column. Even though there's residual stress in the outside
world there isn't enough residual stress to close across this coarse
material that we're using for stemming. That's hard rock with lots
of permeability. How much residual stress does it take to close that
off? I don't know."
That's one of the key issues that we don't really think about
very carefully, and it's part of the difficulty in interpreting the
calculations. I told them, "I see you've put your two plugs in some
very weak areas in the hole. If you do get gases up there, it's liable
to go past the first two plugs." Well, that's exactly what happened.
And at that point I quit doing that because I was ahead of the game,
and it'll probably never happen again.
What I'm learning in this process is that maybe I shouldn't be

quite so positive about having a residual stress and that means we're
not going to get anything up the stemming column. Of course,
we've had a lot of successes, and that's why there's such limited
experience. The failures are really where you do most of your
learning.
Carothers: Billy, in summary, why should there be two
different stemming plans? I could say, "One is better than the
other, so you should use the better one." Or, "They're both equally
good, in which case you should use the cheaper one."
Hudson: It really is not terribly rational to have two entirely
different stemming plans. I think we are getting closer together.
Maybe the people in the containment programs at Livermore and
Los Alamos are a little more rational today than they were in the
past. But one wonders, "Why have we persisted so long in doing
things differently, almost for the sake of doing things differently?"
I think we probably should adopt similar stemming plans, and similar
ways of blocking cable bundles. Parts of each are probably better
than parts of the other. Parts of each are less expensive than parts
of the other. Why not develop a compromise which is as good as
either one, and costs less than either?
Experiment stations in tunnels can be quite large. The basic limitation

is cost, not the mining technology.
419
16
Tunnels and Line-of-Sight Pipes
The Livermore people did the first several tunnel events,

starting with Rainier in 1957. One of the problems that concerned
the diagnostic physicists as the movement to underground detona-
tions began was that they would not be able to, on an underground
detonation, get the data that they were accustomed to getting on
atmospheric shots. Fast camera records for the determination of the
device yield from the growth of the fireball, for example, seemed to
be out of the question. Or, how could there be multiple lines of
sight, looking at the reactions in different parts of the device? And
so on.
Brownlee: The guys who measured things, whether they were
the radiochemists, or the physicists measuring reaction rates, or
looking at neutrons or x-rays or gammas or whatever, felt that they
obviously needed to test in the atmosphere. So, when we got ready
to go underground - - were forced to go underground from their
point of view - - there was the hand-wringing, the weeping in the
streets, the swearing, because, "We can't make our measurements
any more. We can't learn what we need to learn about the bomb."
Therefore, if they had to go underground they wanted, always, a
pipe that looked at the bomb and gave them a solid angle that was
as big as the one where they used to stand for an atmospheric shot.
And this pipe had to be open all the way. That's what they wanted.
To some, a tunnel seemed to offer the best way, underground,
to provide such access to the device. In principle a tunnel could be
as big in cross section as someone was willing to pay for. Further,
the device itself, and the associated firing equipment, could be
brought in and the device made ready for firing in a way very similar
to the way it was done on the atmospheric shots. Since there was
personnel access to detector stations until very near shot time,
alignments could be made and checked, a failed detector could be
replaced, vacuum leaks could be repaired, and so on. All of these
things were difficult or impossible when the device and all the
experimental equipment had to be lowered down a relatively small-
diameter emplacement hole.
On the other hand, if there was to be no release of radioactive
materials to the atmosphere, somehow the opening leading to the
device had to be closed after the desired information was obtained.
The experience was mixed. Rainier had released no radioactive
material. Nor had Logan, which had a line-of-sight pipe used to
allow samples to be exposed to the device output. Neptune and
Blanca had vented. Both of those could be attributed to an insuffi-
cient amount of material over the detonation. So, it seemed that an
underground detonation with a pipe of some size to allow the
radiation from the explosion to reach diagnostic detectors, or to
irradiate samples could certainly be done and the detonation con-
tained. However, as later tunnel events showed, containment of the
radioactive products was not as simple as it had first seemed, nor
was it easy to assure the protection of the samples.
But first, to do an experiment in a tunnel the tunnel had to be
mined. Bill Flangas was the mining superintendent at the Test Site
for many years.
Carothers: I have asked people why they picked Rainier Mesa
for the first underground tunnel shot, and about the only answers
I have gotten is that it was there, and it was good minable rock.
What do they mean by "good minable rock?"
Flangas: Well, it's a rock that's in the neighborhood of a couple
of thousand psi in compressive strength, and so it's easy to mine. In
the tuffs in Rainier it's easy to drill out a face, and once you've
drilled it you didn't even have to use full strength dynamite. We
were using 25 to 30 percent compared to the usual 50 and 60 we
use in hard rock. It's the kind of material that has to be supported,
but it's easily supported. In those days we were using wooden sets,
and then we went to steel sets, and used some rock bolts. Then we
went to wire mesh and shotcrete, which is a mixture of cement and
water. It's a modern version of gunnite. The products come out of
the nozzle, where they are plastered up against the wall. It's gotten
refined to the point where getting six and seven thousand psi
strength with shotcrete is pretty routine.
Tunnels and Line-of-Sight Pipes 421
And in tuff you can use the Alpine Miner, which is a machine
that's like a tractor. It's got a boom, and on the end of the boom
is a rotating cylinder, which has carbide bits on it. This boom
articulates up and down, and back and forth. As the cylinder rotates
it just grinds the rock away. It works very well in soft rock, like tuff.
It wouldn't touch granite.
During the Hardtack II operation, from September 12 to Octo-
ber 31, 1958, seven devices were detonated in tunnels in Rainier
Mesa. Neptune, Logan, and Blanca were mentioned in Chapter 1.
Mercury (slight yield), Mars (13 tons), Tamalpais (72 tons), and
Evans (55 tons), were all events with very low yields, but even so all
but Mercury released some radioactivity. Following Tamalpais,
fired on October 8, 1958, there was an noteworthy incident related
to the gaseous by-products of a detonation, which were not, in a
sense, contained.
Flangas: Tamalpias was where we had the infamous hydrogen
explosion. When we shot Tamalpias, because of the short lived
products, some of the early readings in the tunnel were up there in
the 10,000 R range. And so the consensus was, "Okay, this tunnel
is gone." And we still had not fired Evans.
We had been working seven days a week, twenty-four hours a
day, and I never left that tunnel day or night. Most of the time I
was sleeping on my desk. By the time we shot Tamalpais some of
us were flat wore out. So, once they start reading those kind of
numbers it looked like the ball game was over as far as that tunnel
went, and I went home. I got home about nine or ten o'clock that
night, and I was still asleep at two o'clock the next afternoon when
a call came through that said to hurry on back. The readings were
down to 300 or 400 mR, and they were anxious to get started again.
By the time I got back up there it was like four o'clock. The
Livermore honchos were there, and some of my troops had been
assembled and they were there.
I asked the question, "What have we got." They said, "It looks
like the highest exposure right now is like 400 mR." We could stand
that for reentry. And then, of course, my next question was about
explosive mixtures. I was assured that there was no explosive
mixture. What had really happened is that due to the inexperience
of both the Lab people and others, the meters they had in those days
got saturated, and so they were reading zero, when in fact the place
was loaded with hydrogen.
1 went into the tunnel and 1 went back several hundred feet.
The hair was standing up on my head, because I knew there was
something wrong, but I couldn't put a finger on it. So, I came back
out, and I repeated the question. "How are we in terms of an
explosive mixture, or are there are any other gases, or any exotic
gases I don't know anything about?" And again I was assured.
"Quit worrying about it. You do not have an explosive mixture."
I went back in the tunnel. We were doing some preliminary
work to get started, because it was important to get ventilation
established so we could clear the tunnel out so we could proceed.
I came back out again, was reassured again. As I ruled out every
possibility, it occurred to me to wonder if my antennae weren't
geared to an oxygen deficiency. One of the things copper miners
fear the worst is oxygen deficiency, and in those days, in a copper
mine, under Nevada state law, you had to provide every miner with
a candle. The way you checked for oxygen deficiency was with a
candle, because a candle goes out at 16% oxygen, or thereabouts.
Carothers: You can also check for hydrogen that way.
Flangas: Oh boy, can you. So, anyway, I lit the candle, and
I went all the way back in the tunnel. I was holding it just about chest
level, and it was burning, so that ruled out oxygen deficiency. The
rad-safe superintendent had climbed up on a sandbag plug, which
was at about the 700 station; - 700 feet from the portal. And he
says, "Hey Flangas, hand me that candle." So, I handed him the
candle. Well, being a light gas, and without that environment having
been disturbed, the hydrogen had accumulated along the top of the
tunnel. He was up in that atmosphere, and Lordy, Lordy. I was
standing in the middle of the drift, at the 700 station, and he was
up at the top of that sandbag plug. He said, when we talked to him
a couple of days later, that he saw a flame that just went down to
the 1200 station, where the other door was, and he was fascinated
by the sight. I was standing right on the track there, and the next
thing I knew I was head over heels, and when I picked myself up, I
was at the 350 foot station.
I have no idea . . . it was . . . just everything was in motion.

We had laid plywood along that entire tunnel to protect the cables.
That plywood was shredded to sawdust, to small fragments. There
was a six inch steel door at the 350 foot station, and fortunately one
of my shifters laid the track across there. We had to pull the track
out to close the door, so when we opened the door, we put the track
back in. That six inch door folded over that track into a U.
Carothers: Bill, with all that going on, how come you're sitting
here today?
Flangas: I have never been able to figure that out. I came out
of that thing without a scratch. I think if you tried it a million times
you'd have a million dead miners and never succeed in duplicating
that.
Carothers: What about the guy who was up on the sandbag
plug?
Flangas: Fortunately, what happened to him is that when it
went off the concussion knocked him down to the base of the plug,
and when the explosion took place, it blew over him. Now, in that
melee I turned around to look for him. My miner's lamp was
shattered, and the place was just a bedlam. So, I looked for him for
about a millisecond, and then I decided, "What the hell, it's every
man for himself, and I'm getting out of here."
There were another four or five people in a side drift, and they
escaped the blast. It went right past them. After all of this settled
down we kind of found one another in the dark there. We finally
retrieved this fellow by the name of Wilcox, and he was out colder
than a wedge, at the base of the plug. When the blast door folded
over it left a hole just barely big enough for a person to squeeze
through. We accounted for everybody and got them out. The
people on the outside were pretty excited. They thought everybody
in that tunnel was dead, and that was a pretty good presumption at
that time. So they called the ambulances and doctors, and there was
a lot of commotion. It was a very unique experience.
Carothers: There was another case where somebody turned on
the power at the portal, and caused an explosion.
Flangas: That was the same incident. Once we got everybody
out, and things settled down, we put a gate with a four-inch wire
mesh across the portal. We just took some two by fours and made
a gate to keep anybody from inadvertently walking into the tunnel.

Then somebody said, "Well, let's turn on the lights and see what it
looks like." So, they turned on the lights, and that was the second
explosion. I was gone by then, but they tell me that wooden gate
we put at the portal, with a four-inch mesh, sailed some three or four
hundred feet away. So, those two incidents took place in the same
tunnel within a couple of hours of each other.
We learned a hard lesson there. As a result of those incidents,
in a very short time reentry became a very formal, tightly controlled
process. That was a long time before the rest of the Test Site became
procedurized. In fact, I think I'm the person responsible for
developing and calling for the first formal mine rescue training. I
had a vested interest, because I was leading a lot of those reentry
teams. From there on it became a very sophisticated process, and
it remains so to this day. No shortcuts, and no hurry up and do
something unless you've ruled out all the possibilities. Subsequent
to that there has never been another incident of that type.
Carothers: There had been, in 1957, the Rainier shot. After
the moratorium started there was extensive reentry work. Did you
have anything have anything to do with that reentry?
Flangas: I had a lot to do with Rainier. Once I came here and
worked for a few days at E tunnel, I was sent up to take over B
tunnel. B tunnel was the one that had the Rainier shot, and at that
time they were making some efforts to dig a little incline down
towards the original ground zero. But Livermore had a couple
events that they needed to fire prior to the moratorium, and there
was just one hellacious effort to get them off.
After the moratorium started, and things settled down, we
started mining back to recover the initial ground zero, and we did.
The only radioactivity that couldn't be handled was just as you
entered the cavity, where the melt was up against the wall. What
we did was, we just put some lead plates up where we crossed that
threshold. Past that you got into a relatively radioactively cool area.
The real problem on that was the ground temperatures were
still in the neighborhood of 160 to 170 degrees. We were drilling
and blasting, and the manufacturer of the dynamite wouldn't
guarantee the product beyond 180 degrees. And we were dealing
with at least 160 degrees. So, we would drill the holes for the
dynamite, then we would cool them with water, and then put three
or four people in there loading. We could load it out in about one

minute flat, under the circumstances, and wire it. So, we felt fairly
secure, even though the manufacturer would only guarantee the
dynamite up to 1 80 degrees. We knew that the manufacturers give
themselves a little wiggle room.
Every time we exposed a fresh face, because there was a lot of
humidity there, there was just a tremendous amount of steam, and
visibility was bad. And then there was this business of really pushing
on the loading and shooting. The miners took all that in good stride,
and we knew that it was significant work. There was always a great
degree of excitement with this business, and I guess that's what kept
us here. It was a unique operation.
We did that during those moratorium years. Later on it was
decided, I guess when things began to get shaky with the Soviets, to
prepare a couple of three test beds in the event they were needed,
so we dug a couple more sites up there at B tunnel, and we were
putting one down at E tunnel also. Then there were three tunnels,
called I, J, and K, which, if I remember right, came right after the
Russians broke the moratorium. We built up tremendously during
that period.
Carothers: Only two of those were used. That area was
abandoned after Platte and Des Moines vented. Gene Pelsor said,
"The reason they're behaving like that is because the rocks are
different." Us somewhat naive physics types said, "Rocks? Differ-
ent? What's different about a rock?" Anyway, after Des Moines
and Piatt Livermore got a little wary of the tunnel business, and
began to move more and more to drill holes. I think the last tunnel
shot they did was Yuba, in 1963.
Flangas: That's about right. That was, again, up in B tunnel.
Carothers: Did you do any work on things like Hard Hat, or
Pile Driver? They were in granite.
Flangas: Yes, they were in granite. I quarterbacked both of
those. Granite is a much different medium than tuff. The granite
there is about ten, twelve, fourteen thousand psi. It takes different
things and ways to mine it. In the tuff we were drilling with a rotary
drill with a wing tip on it, and we could drill out the holes for the
f.'V'.'
dynamite in a round in fifteen or twenty minutes. In the granite it

took a hour and a half to two hours to drill out a round. Generally
we would drill ten foot holes and try to pull nine feet a round.
There were a number of fracture patterns there, and there were
a couple of major faults there too. But generally speaking, the
fracture patterns were very tight, and the material stood up very
well. But there were a series of hairline fractures, in a regular
sequence.
Pile Driver was an extraordinarily big, complicated, expensive
event. It took some three, three and a half years to prepare and
execute that. There was a shaft, and a drift at the bottom. 1 think
it was Walsh that sunk the original shaft down to about 800 feet.
That first event, Hard Hat, took place there. Then I wound up
making the reentry on Hard Hat. That was my piece of that action.
Carter Broyles was the longtime head of the Sandia effort in
underground test and containment:
Carothers: Came the moratorium in 1958 with the balloon
with the bomb hanging on it as time ran out. What did you do during
those three years of the moratorium?
Broyles: Designed Marshmallow.
Carothers: For three years?
Broyles: Almost. We designed and built it once, in E tunnel.
Then when we went back to testing we started all over again. I did
a few other things during that time. 1 finished writing reports from
the above ground tests, but I did spend a lot of time on Marshmal-
low. In fact, for the next I don't know how many years, along with
Wendell Weart, who was the Containment Director for DNA or its
predecessors, I was the Scientific Director for DNA's effects tests.
I was the Scientific Director for Marshmallow, in '62, and then for
Midi Mist, in '67. That job doesn't exist at DNA now, but in that
job 1 took the overall responsibility for not only the engineering
design of the tests, but for the experimental designs of the tests as
well.
Olen Nance, a consultant, was my containment expert, along
with Jack Welch, for Marshmallow. It was Olen who designed the
hook, the side drift, on Marshmallow, which was supposed to close
the tunnel off for sure.
Carothers: That was an experiment which was designed to get

effects information, in an underground environment. Logan was the
first event of that type, but Marshmallow was somewhat different.
You must have spent a lot of time thinking about sample protection.
Broyles: We did. That was really the first horizontal line-of-
sight (HLOS) containment design problem that we faced. Marsh-
mallow, in a way, was the most severe test we've ever had, because
it had two line-of-sight pipes. One looked directly at the bomb, and
the other looked into a holhraum. So, we were stemming and trying
to close two pipes, one above the other, both of which were pretty
good size.
The original tunnel stemming concept started out with stem-
ming, then voids, then more stemming; the general concept was to
be non-symmetric to be sure we didn't generate jets, or a continu-
ous flow down the pipe. That design disappeared, and was replaced
by others, some of which may or may not have been better. The
whole community was developing a calculational capability, so
people's understanding of what you could and couldn't, and ought
and ought not to do for containment developed partly as people
developed the tools for calculating what might be expected. Bill
Grasberger had some input into those calculations, even though he
was mainly the bomb designer for the initial source.
Olen's original idea was really a follow-on from the buttonhook
design of Rainier, which was designed to push from the side and slam
the tunnel shut. His design was a cheaper, maybe more economical
way to go. Instead of the buttonhook, it was simply a side drift at
an angle. It was was designed to store energy, so it was lined in
order to slow down the diffusion of the energy, and so produce a
stronger ground shock. It wasn't very many shots later when people
decided that the hook wasn't all that useful. You could get just as
much by the ground shock squeezing the tunnel down.
There were two sets of doors on Marshmallow. They were
simply big, steel doors mounted like the prow of a ship, They were
covered with sheets of HE, and slammed shut as a V-shaped thing.
They were really debris stoppers and were not designed to contain
gases. That's what we had on Marshmallow. So, it was really the
ground shock that did any containment that occurred.
Marshmallow, while it didn't contain perfectly, didn't really

damage the outside world very much, as did some other under-
ground tests. If you go back and look at Marshmallow, it had
essentially every measurement of every type we've ever done on an
test with a source like that, including piping out a line-of-sight, and
moving the camera bunker underground. We reentered, and the
cameras were recovered. The cameras were in a protected bunker,
which had a positive overpressure from tanks of nitrogen. It was just
like things we've been doing ever since. The film was exposed to a
few R, but it was given special development, and they actually
recovered images.
Weart: One of the first things I got involved in when I came
to Sandia was to reenter an event called Marshmallow, which was a
tunnel shot that was conducted in Area 16, in 1962. It was a shot
with a long line-of-sight pipe, in a tunnel. It was conducted for
experimental purposes, rather than for developing a device, and was
considered to be a relatively successful event. At that time there
had been only a small amount of experience with tunnel shots, and
particularly with pipe shots in a tunnel.
Being a geologist, and with my background, I provided the
technical direction for that reentry. People had a desire to continue
this type of testing, but they realized that they understood very little
about what phenomena, what mechanisms actually determined
whether or not you could prevent the radioactivity from coming
down the tunnel or down the pipe, and out to an area where it would
cause you great difficulty with the recovery of your experiments.
So, they thought maybe we could learn something by mining back
in to the first several hundred feet from the detonation point. We
wanted to see if we could reconstruct from what we observed there
what may have gone on. We did develop some ideas and concepts
which were used on subsequent pipe shots, but we really didn't have
a good understanding. It was all very empirical in those days.
Mostly the kind of thing we did on Marshmallow was to collect
samples of the material we had used to fill portions of the tunnel.
On that particular event the stemming was just sandbags, and in
fact, the tunnel wasn't completely filled. There were individual
stemmed sections with long air gaps in between. We took samples
from those plugs to see to what density they had been compacted
by the ground shock. Even in the void areas, where there was no
stemming, the tunnel was now full of the surrounding tuff, which
had been injected into these void regions. And it was tightly
compacted, as was the stemming material. To me the most
impressive thing was to go back in to where the pipe had been, and
see the complete and utter disruption of any continuity of the pipe.
There were just massive pieces of steel, almost unrecognizable if you
hadn't known what they were ahead of time.
As I recall, the area of fairly intense radioactivity was separated
from the place where the tunnel was not collapsed, and was open,
by a relatively short distance. It wasn't a long interval; there wasn't
a massive plug of a hundred feet or more. It was a relatively short
distance, and it led one to think that we may have come close to a
situation where we wouldn't have contained this event very well at
all. It pointed out that we really ought to understand what was going
on.
Broyles: When Sandia got into the underground business a few
years later, the doors were recognized as one of the big shortcom-
ings for experiment protection, because we saw lots of projectiles in
those days. They would come down the pipes and penetrate the
doors. We had a distribution on those doors; everything from
gaping holes down to craters with embedded particles. We carried
out an extensive survey, and we talked to all the astrophysicists we
could find who were experts on moon craters and asteroid impacts,
trying to figure out velocities and energies, and so on. We ended
up deciding we had things from fractions of grams to hunks, flying
from very low velocities up to ten or twenty kilometers per second.
From the things we saw, we were satisfied that a lot of them,
probably not all of them, were pieces of the front end of the pipe,
or something up quite close. It also appeared that some of it,
probably not the high velocity stuff, was grout being thrown down
the pipe. Even in those early days that was recognized as very likely
the stuff coming later in time. The early pieces were were mostly
from the pipe walls, or closures, or the baffles. Most of the early
shots had baffles, which were somewhat like a collimator, or a heavy
baffle that you put in a muffler. They were a four-inch thick ring
that stuck three or four inches into the pipe. After one or two tries
it was decided they kept the pipe open more than they shut it down.
They blew the pipe up, so it didn't get closed very well.
All of those things influenced people's thinking about what and

how to design the close-in stemming to prevent not only late time
leaks and containment failures, but to try to minimize the early time
stuff that might damage the experiments.
There was always an argument from the very beginning; did
you do more good by stopping the stuff, or by letting it go. And
there were a lot of arguments that went on about whether you could
choose an optimum place to put a muffler. If you placed it in close
enough to where the ground shock closed it, maybe you wouldn't
interfere with the ground shock closing the pipe. But, if you got it
in that close, the cavity would expand and collapse it, and maybe it
wouldn't matter. Those kind of arguments went on, and people did
some crude calculations. But very quickly the community decided
that ground shock wasn't really the way to guarantee, for these
horizontal Iine-of-sights, that the world was protected. And they
decided they needed more protection for the experiments than just
the ground shock.
So, by the late sixties, on Cypress, we put in the first double
sliding doors. That was a Sandia innovation for Cypress. They slid
closed sideways as a backup to the ground shock pipe closure, but
they also were put in as an early time protection against the high
velocity debris, to protect the experiments from that. All of those
were originally designed simply as debris stoppers. Later, people
thought they could save money by combining that with some kind
of gas seal.
As people developed calculational capabilities and equations
of state to try to make intelligent calculations, the spaces in the
tunnel where there was air between the stemming regions were
replaced with some compressible solid material. If you look at the
earlier shots, they would have a hundred feet of this, then fifty feet
of air, then a hundred feet of that. Then the air got replaced with
weak grout, with asymmetrical voids on one side of the pipe so the
ground shock would shear things off and close it up.
As time went on, most of the detailed worrying was really
about sample protection, because they found protection for the
outside world had been taken over by the overburden plugs. After
a time everybody recognized that you could design a plug that just
by brute force could contain a complete leak. I think it was after

Camphor that DNA really went, in the early seventies, to more or
less the current designs.
Carothers: There was a period of a few years when Sandia
sponsored their own events underground; there was Cypress, and
then Camphor?
Broyles: Cypress and Camphor were the only two, in '69 and
' 7 1 . Baneberry was near Christmas 1 970, so Camphor got delayed
until June 1971. It was originally scheduled for right after
Baneberry. Those were the only two horizontal Iine-of-sight experi-
ments, in tunnels, that we did. Before that we sponsored a couple
of the vertical line-of-sight shots. Derringer was the first one, and
that was, in a way, a different kind of thing. There was a drift at the
bottom of the hole, where the experiments were, and there was no
Iine-of-sight to the surface.
I really had nothing to do with that; I was doing high altitude
work at the time. Wendell was involved with the containment
design, and Bob Statler, I think, was the Test Director for Derringer.
The experiments were the exposure of components, and sub-
systems, and the systems down the Iine-of-sight. It didn't really
contain, in the sense of protecting the experiments; they ended up
not being protected enough. Really, essentially not at all. But, the
emphasis was more on getting the real-time measurements out. If
we could have recovered the samples it would have been a bonus,
but that clearly wasn't as important as the other measurements.
Parallel to that there has been the continued evolution of the
calculational capability, and as I see it, more and more willingness
to believe the calculations of the ground motion and the ground-
shock induced motion.
Carothers: Sandia was involved with tunnel events for some
years. What was your participation in that work?
Weart: I was involved as a sort of containment design
consultant for DNA on many of their shots. I'm not sure I
remember the exact sequence anymore, but Gum Drop was a early
shot after Marshmallow, and then there were a number of DNA
tunnel shots with line-of-sight pipes. Sandia initiated some experi-
ments of their own which required line-of-sight pipes in tunnels;
Cypress, and Camphor. In addition to the tunnels, 1 worked on the

containment design for some of the vertical LOS pipes like Diluted
Waters.
Carothers: What were the things that you were trying to
address on those early effects shots, as part of the containment?
Weart: Everyone was concerned about the energy flow down
the pipes, and how to make sure that did not interact in such a way
that it kept the pipe open, rather than letting the ground shock
squeeze the pipe closed. We did have some codes that were used
to do those kinds of calculations, but they were, I'm afraid, a fairly
simplistic look at things. It was as much as anything a matter of
timing the closures, rather than any sophisticated effort to minimize
or mitigate the flow. It was a matter of how quickly could you get
something in the way.
We viewed it as a three part sequence. Very close, within fifty
feet of the detonation point, we tried to rely on the energy of the
bomb to do the work for us. Then a little further out, but where the
Iine-of-sight would allow it, there were fast acting, high explosive
driven systems. And still further out, slower, larger aperture
mechanical systems, pneumatically driven. We tried to calculate
the times when significant energy pulses might arrive down the pipe
so we could try to intercept them. The hope was that we could, if
not completely stop them, at least slow them down until what we
always regarded as the main mechanism, the ground shock itself,
would have a chance to outrace the energy in the pipe and squeeze
it off.
Carothers: You said that on Marshmallow there was sandbag
stemming. What did you use on Gum Drop?
Weart: I think it was still sand. The early shots all used
alternating sand plugs. At first we used sandbags; later we went to
sand blown in. But this was not continuous - - there were voids
designed to be in the stemming. That came out of some early ideas
that Olen Nance had. His concept was to create an interval where
the ground shock would not be moving in smoothly and uniformly
through a sand-stemmed area. Rather, when it reached the void in
the stemmed interval it would implode the wall, create a lot of
turbulence, and disrupt the pipe in a more discontinuous way than
the more continuous collapse in the stemmed areas. There were
observations in some of the early reentries, like Marshmallow and
Gum Drop, which seemed to support this; in the areas where there
was no stemming there was much more complete disruption of the
line-of-sight pipes than in areas where the stemming was continuous.
In the continuously stemmed areas the pipe was squeezed more
uniformly, which would leave a tightly squeezed mass of steel, but
with little paths through which gases could migrate, and perhaps
eventually erode the material to make much larger paths.
And those early designs seemed to work. Whether it was what
we did, or just because we were lucky, the early shots were
successful; if they had been utter disasters we probably wouldn't
have kept on doing it that way. Logan worked well. Marshmallow
did have a little seepage out, but not a massive failure; the
experiments weren't severely compromised, or anything like that,
and Gum Drop, in 1965, worked very well. So, people thought
they knew all they needed to know.
But it wasn't too long before we found out that even though
you did things exactly the same way, the results weren't always
exactly the same. We continued to apply the same techniques we
had used for closing the line-of-sight pipe and for stemming the drift
itself, but as we began to have more and more of these events, many
of them were severe failures. High temperatures and intense
radioactivity would get out beyond the stemmed area, beyond the
mechanical seals, out to the experiments themselves. And occasion-
ally, even though we would put in things we called gas-seal doors,
they were circumvented and some radioactivity was released into
the atmosphere. When these kind of events started to occur, people
started to wonder, "If the old techniques happened to work all right,
what could be different? What can we do to maximize our chance
of success, since we obviously aren't optimum."
Carothers: One of the things you could have pointed out to
them, Wendell, as a geophysicist, is that the earth is not a nice,
homogeneous medium. One place is not like another place, even
a rather close by other place.
Weart: That's right. And as we went along, I think that fact
took on a great deal of significance to us. We had relied upon the
ground shock to provide closure, but we really hadn't tried to
optimize that ground shock by finding regions where the seismic
velocity would be high, and where we could maintain high pressures
from the ground shock out to greater distances. We knew at that
time, from a variety of sources, that you do have higher velocities

in some parts of the rocks than in others. For instance, the addition
of moisture will change the velocity, and will change the coupling
of the energy.
We knew that we would like the ground shock to eventually
outdistance the energy within the LOS, and sometimes people
envisioned the gaps in the stemming as ways of dissipating the
energy in the LOS, and of slowing it down. Later, people built things
into the LOS, like mufflers, or enlarged zones, to do the same thing.
But the effort was on trying to slow down that energy in the LOS
rather than to utilize favorable geology to speed up the ground
shock.
Carothers: We're talking about the sixties, or early seventies.
What tools, or techniques did you have then to investigate geologic,
or geophysical properties? Were there tools available if people had
wanted to look at the details of the geologic medium?
Weart: Yes. If there had been sufficient impetus to do it, I
think we could have, for instance, determined the seismic velocity
in the tuff in the tunnels. The tools were not as easily applied as the
ones we have today, but there were techniques for doing it. Those
things weren't really applied to containment design in the early days
because we really didn't understand in detail what was causing the
closure. Because we had some early successes, we just said, "It's
working, so we won't worry about it."
As time went on, the experimenters began to impose greater
demands. They wanted bigger apertures, which meant bigger pipes
that took longer to close, and were harder to close. And they
wanted to move experiments in closer and closer. Sometimes these
things were in conflict with being able to do the things you'd really
like to do to assure the best prospects for containment. 1 think, in
fact, in talking about the Sandia events, Cypress and Camphor, that
was one of the biggest changes between those two designs. There
was a much larger line-of-sight pipe on Camphor, and an experiment
station very close-in which we tried to protect with a massive
concrete structure, to hold it open for an interval. And that interval
turned out to be an important interval from the standpoint of
ground shock closure.
It is interesting to compare Wendell Weart's remarks about the

early tunnel shots - - "So, people thought they knew all they needed
to know. But it wasn't too long before we found out that even though
you did things exactly the same way, the results weren't always
exactly the same. We continued to apply the same techniques we
had used for closing the line-of-sight pipe and for stemming the drift
itself, but as we began to have more and more of these events, many
of them were severe failures. High temperatures and intense radio-
activity would get out beyond the stemmed area, beyond the me-
chanical seals, out to the experiments themselves." - - with those of
Ed Peterson about events that occured some two decades later.
Peterson: It seems to me that things behave differently now
than they did in, say, the Dining Car era in the mid-seventies. There
are very small changes in design, but we have seen very large
changes in performance. Mighty Oak was the largest, and Misty
Rain was pretty large. Huron Landing was somewhat smaller,
Miner's Iron was a little bit smaller, and so forth. Yet the design
changes were small. If somebody just came up and told me, "This
is how we're changing it," I'd say, "It's no big deal. We only guessed
at the first one, so how can ten percent kill you?"
But, it appears to, and so, given the science that we all learned
in school, one has to ask the question, "Why?" and that is very, very
difficult to answer. To me it is as if you plot something versus time,
and you were going along flat, and then you see the curve continue
to rise as far as things you don't like to see. It hasn't been necessarily
a step change, as you would see at a disconinuity; I think it has been
a gradual change. But I don't know why the gradual change
occurred. We were going flat for so long. And it isn't apparent to
me what changes occur with what small design modifications. To go
to the extreme, you can talk about the "tired mountain," which
would explain things by saying that the structure is just degenerating
with time because you've done more and more shots. 1 am not
convinced at all that is what it is.
The DOD sponsored a variey of effects shots after the morato-
rium, beginning with Hard Hat in 1962. There were cratering
events, vertical line-of-sight shots, and Small Boy, the last atmo-
spheric detonation to be conducted at the Test Site. By 1965 the
focus was more and more on tunnel events.
Flangas: DNA came into the picture in the middle sixties.

They came into the picture with Hard Hat. That was theirs. A few
years later they came up to Rainier and made a reconnaissance. I
had dug the original N tunnel, and I had dug the original P tunnel,
both for Livermore. And, both of them were abandoned. I think
I dug N tunnel in about 1963, and then after I finished N tunnel,
I went to P tunnel, and took it back about a thousand feet. Then,
Io and behold, one day they said, "We're not going to use them."
So, we boarded them up, and they were left that way for at least two
or three years.
I think it was about 1966 that a colonel came out looking for
either to dig himself a tunnel, or find a tunnel, and he wound up in
contact with me. 1 said to him, "I don't know who owns this tunnel,
but there is a tunnel that has never been used. It is in a delightful
location, and it's a good tunnel." So, 1 took him into N tunnel. That
suited their needs, and whatever arrangements they made between
the AEC and the Lab, and the DOD resulted in them taking that
over.
The first tunnel events in Rainier Mesa were containment
failures. Lacking the base of scientists and engineers that existed at
Los Alamos and Livermore, the DOD people doing the events turned
to Sandia and the few contractors who could help with the problems
of containment and protection of the experiments placed in the
tunnels.
LaComb: At first it was General Atomics people, and ulti-
mately those people became S-Cubed, who were saying that there
should be this particular kind of grout here, and that one there. On
Door Mist (8/31/67), and after Door Mist, they were asking for
very high strength grout, which wasn't a good thing to do. Door
Mist was not real successful.
Carothers: What led you to focus on the high strength grout
as the problem?
LaComb: The reentry observations indicated that, to a degree,
we did have a solid tunnel plug, but the leak path went out fourteen
feet into the tuff, around the plug, and back into the tunnel. We're
not sure what drove that, but we felt we'd have been better off if
we could have kept it in the tunnel rather than forcing it out of the
tunnel.
Midi Mist, in ]une of '67, was done with rock-matching grout.

That is a misnomer, because that grout is intentionally designed not
to match the rock. It's called rock-matching grout, but we've set
criteria where it should have a compressional velocity lower than the
tuff, it should have a strength lower than the surrounding tuff, and
it should have a density which matched the rock as closely as
possible, but hopefully not higher. What we wanted to do, in
theory, was to make the ground shock going out from the zero room
go slower in the tunnel than it was in the rocks, so the shock was
driving in on the tunnel, and slamming the pipe in the tunnel closed.
It's probably not a bad theory.
Carothers: Dan, to what extent do you get involved in
specifying the kinds of grouts, or over what length there should be
rock matching grout, or superlean grout, or whatever?
Patch: We like to think we play a fairly important role in that.
We certainly have looked at the effects of changing the lengths of
the grouts, and we've made recommendations based on what we've
seen in the calculations as to whether a grout should be stronger or
weaker. We have tried to work with the folks at the Waterways
Experiment Station as closely as we can to understand how they
formulate grouts. We don't do the formulation in the sense that we
don't say how much of what to put into something, because we
would be way over our heads there. In a way we don't really work
directly with WES in terms of formulations. We'll talk to Byron
Ristvet, or Joe LaComb, and say, "For this kind of geometry we
think we need a stronger grout in this particular section, because it
will help relieve loads," or whatever the criteria and reasons are.
Then, it's been ]oe primarily who has had the most direct role
in the grout formulation area. He'll go talk to the WES folks and say,
"These crazy calculators want something that will do these strange
things. What can you guys do?" They'll think about it, and they're
very, very good at knowing how all these ingredients interact with
each other. One of the problems we do have is that we're looking
at how these materials respond at many kilobars, and the formula-
tors are civil engineers and concrete engineers who tend to think
about how bridges would react, and what one would do to make a
pedestal stronger, or whatever. They bring a much more engineer-
ing structural point of view, and we really have to try hard to
overcome that different point of view.
.#
Carothers: Each time there's a presentation of a DNA shot at

the CEP it seems that the boundaries of the different grouts, and the
placement of the hardware are different. This run of grout is a little
longer, but not much, and that one is a little shorter, but not much.
There seems to be a lot of fine tuning.
Patch: There is a lot of fine-tuning, and 1 think there's two
reasons for that. One of the things that's going on there is in some
sense operational. For instance, people may want to put bulkheads
at certain places, but because the tunnel has some change in it, it's
undesirable to do that from a construction point of view. Things
tend to move around for that reason. Again, folks may want to
move something a significant distance, so they will call up and say,
"We were planning to put the superlean out to X range, but it would
be really nice if we could make it five or six feet longer. Do you think
this is a problem?" And we'll either say, "That couldn't possibly
make any difference," or we'll say, "Well, we don't know. We'd
better look at that, because we think it's a little long right now." We
run into things like that, where people have wanted to make things
a little longer, and we thought were kind of on the long side already,
or vice versa.
Carothers: Joe, what kind of consideration was given to the
front end of the pipe, where the energy began to get into the pipe?
LaComb: Actually, I'm not sure the front end for Double Play
(6/15/66) was ever calculated, although Noyer kept wanting to go
back and do it. I think the General Atomic folks tried to calculate
Door Mist, and Chuck Dismukes came into the picture then. I think
it was about the Midi Mist, Door Mist time frame that the front end
calculations started coming in.
Carothers: Were you putting overburden plugs on all of these
shots?
LaComb: Yes. In those days it was called a blast plug. I guess
there's a difference.
Carothers: Perhaps it represents your expectations, you might
say.
LaComb: We were quite successful for a little while. We never
did really come up with a good explanation why we had Mint Leaf
(5/5/70). It was another gross failure, and it had another leak over
the top of the far-out TAPS. It's interesting that the cross sectional
area of that path was the same as the one on Door Mist. That's why
Ed Peterson uses eleven square feet when he calculates a leak from
the cavity.
Hudson Moon (5/26/70) was not as bad in the tunnel as
Double Play or Door Mist was. Door Mist was a step beyond Hudson
Moon. Hudson Moon had all the lagging charred, and it didn't have
it's strength, but it was still in place rather than being completely
gone. The DBS, the debris barrier system, which we had added to
the pipe string to be a barrier, did a good job of protecting the
samples that were in the test chamber. They got more of a soak
temperature than anything straight down the pipe. We were pretty
lucky there, because the leak path went outside the pipe. The pipe
was closed off by the debris barrier system, so it was kind of a cocoon
for the samples.
The Hudson Moon rock samples had been very soft, and they
had a very high gas-filled porosity. At the time we tested them, we
said they'd sat at the portal during an extremely cold spell and
they'd frozen. So, we wrote the physical property tests off because
the rocks had frozen. After the test, when we went back into the
tunnel and started to investigate it, we came to the conclusion that
maybe the measurements were right. They might be real. So, then
we went back and started digging further into the Door Mist physical
property data. We found that there also was a lot of gas-filled voids
there. And the longitudinal velocity in both tunnels was low. Then
we started doing some calculations, and we found there is a
significant difference in the ground shock attenuation between one
percent and five percent gas-filled porosity. So, we then attributed
the Hudson Moon failure to the gas-filled porosity.
Duff: Bob Bjork did a series of 1 -D calculations of ground shock
propagation, and he rather dramatically showed the influence of air-
filled porosity on shock wave attenuation. These calculations were
based on naively simple material models, but they showed us that
if you compare the attenuation for one or two percent air voids with
zero air voids, there is quite a difference. If you go to five percent
air voids, you get a little more attenuation. If you go to fifteen
percent air voids, a little more attenuation. It's the first few percent
that makes the big difference. So in the context of the Hudson
Moon failure, we hypothesized that what we had there was a
relatively dry medium, such that the ground shock, which had been
expected to squeeze the tunnel and develop a stemming plug, simply
died. It got too weak too soon.
Then we did a pair of thousand pound HE shots in two media.
One was in a fairly saturated medium, and the other was in a fairly
dry, Hudson Moon-type medium. And, indeed, they confirmed the
validity of the prediction. That has influenced DNA's thinking
about appropriate material properties ever since.
Peterson: After the Hudson Moon leak, one of the things that
was recognized to be different about Hudson Moon was that it had
a high gas-void content. With a material with a high gas-void
content, the ground shock damps out fairly quickly, and so one
doesn't get the closure that one would expect for an event in a low
gas-void material. So, this was pinpointed as one of the reasons for
Hudson Moon.
And, this has been the philosophy for a long time - - you do not
want a high air-void material. Let me give you two contrasting
things, which show why our lack of understanding bothers people
like me. There are people who say, and they may be right, that one
of the reasons, or at least one of the contributors to the Mighty Oak
situation is that it was shot in a material with a very low air-void
content. As a result, the ground shock was too strong, and it drove
the stemming too hard. So, it drove it right through the closures.
You can keep going on with happened from there.
If you look at Mission Cyber, the response you saw was that the
peak stress versus range was low. There's a lot of evidence that it
didn't come from having too low an air void, but the response on
Mission Cyber was similar to what you'd calculate if you just put a
lot of air void in the material. It wasn't there, but the response looks
similar. And on Mission Cyber that worked great. It didn't crunch
anything, and everything was just perfect. So people say, "Well,
you know, maybe some of this air void is really okay."
So, you can go from the extreme of people thinking there was
too much air void to the point where they think there was too little,
and and now maybe a little bit more is better. The history has gone
back and forth, and I'm not sure what the answer is.
LaComb: Misty North (5/2/72) was where we first said we

would test the overburden plug, and we said we would pressure test
the gas seal door. That's where the gas seal plug came into being,
We called it the hasty plug for years, because we couldn't get the
gas seal door to seal. The concrete had enough permeability that
there was always a leak. Finally I said we'd put in another plug. I
walked down the tunnel, looking through the lagging, and said, "Put
it right here." Three days and twenty hours later I was watching the
concrete go into the forms. We could have shot at any time, because
the area was so full of people it couldn't have leaked. That's where
the first gas seal plug came into being. We leak checked it, and we
pressurized between the plug and the door.
It was also the first time we used cable gas blocks We had a
block of concrete that was the world's most expensive. There were
over a thousand cable gas blocks in it, and the cost was well over a
million dollars, and those were big dollars.
Carothers: This was the first time you had done cable gas
blocks?
LaComb: Well, we'd been fooling around with cable gas
blocking for about two years. We weren't very sophisticated, but
we knew how to do it if we had to. We didn't have to go out and
start inventing the wheel. And we still use the same technique
today. We don't have quite as crude an installation, but it's basically
the same. Now we use the bulkhead connectors, but we don't use
a board any more because we put them in Vistinex. And we angle
them so if there is a leak it will just go out and come up some
different conduit.
Carothers: If you had cable holes to the mesa surface you also
had to think about stemming those, and the cables in them to keep
gases from getting out.
LaComb: The cable holes were stemmed, but we never claimed
they were gas tight. We had to go to some extremes to take care
of them, because we had to do it a little differently in every tunnel.
On N tunnel we put a top hat on the top of the hole, with bulkhead
connectors. We squeezed grout and sand down in the hole to get
rid of the boundary leaks.. As I recall, in P tunnel we put the
bulkhead connectors at the bottom of the hole. In T tunnel we
blocked the cables coming out of the downhole cable alcove, and
put plugs in the access drifts to the cable alcove. Each tunnel was
unique in its configuration. We could have said, "Well, we're just

going to drill these holes out, clean them out, and put in new cables
and do it right." Or you can try to save your investment, which is
what we did.
Carothers: You obviously wanted to reuse the tunnels. On
shots where you had leaks into the tunnel to what extent could you
go back and use them again?
LaComb: Well, for Double Play, once we ventilated the tunnel
inside the gas seal plug, we really lost very little, except inside the
overburden plug. The leak was minimal. We did have to go through
and spray the lagging to tie down the dust that was generated when
the grout was scoured out. Other than that we pretty much had the
run of the tunnel within a couple of months. Door Mist, we lost
everything inside the overburden plug, but outside the overburden
plug, because the nature of the leak was just a seep, the tunnel
cleaned up very well. And, so did Hudson Moon. That was the
advantage of having the blast plug in the experimental drift; we were
attenuating that release up-front, close-in. Of course, there we
were providing any release with a very small volume to dump into,
so you could expect the pressures to be high. On Hudson Moon we
saw 700 psi on the front of the overburden plug. But at the same
time, the advantage of that was that it did save the rest of tunnel
complex.
On Mighty Oak, where we had the plugs way out, we lost just
about all of the T tunnel complex. If we ever reuse some of those
openings, it will be a bunch of years. Outside the drift protection
plug though, we have full use of the tunnel for Mission Ghost,
Anything inside of there is lost. All the Diamond Skulls workings,
the Mint Leaf Workings, the Midas Myth workings - - all of that is
lost.
Carothers: You folks in DNA are have a real need to protect
the experiments, and you've done a lot of different research
projects. Have they all been for better ways to protect the
experiments?
LaComb: I think you're oversimplifying to a degree, because
one of the drivers for our low yield test program was real estate, and
facilities reuse for the economics. A low yield test - - two, or one
kilotons, and we're hoping for a half a kiloton - - doesn't have near
as much ground shock associated with it. So you spend a lot less
dollars hardening, a lot less dollars shock mounting. You use up, for
a half kiloton, compared to ten kilotons, only a fraction of the real
estate. Real estate in Rainier Mesa is disappearing, so that's been
a big driver in the development of the low yield test bed. Of course,
the need for the coupling experiments, like Misty Echo, Mill Yard,
and Mini Jade , and the stigma associated with Red Hot have also
driven our program. We've got to work the program so we're able
somehow to do that kind of test. So, a lot of research has been
driven by the need to understand the phenomenology of the events.
Carothers: Bruce, what drove your Iine-of-sight diameters,
which affects the pipe taper and its length? Was it the size of the
hardware that people brought for exposure, or did it happen the
other way; "We're going to have a shot, it's going to have an
exposure area this big, and what have you got?"
Wheeler: I think there was some of both in the early seventies.
Primarily it was driven by military system requirements, the Defense
Department stuff. The size of, and the number of test chambers was
driven by the number of experiments there were; the need for
space. The need for sheltons was the way we quantified it. A
shelton was a calorie per square centimeter, and was a unit of barter.
Many times experiments were not approved to be on a test because
there wasn't any room. That could be a reason, and another reason
could be the experimenter hadn't done his homework well enough.
But space was always at a premium. However big the exposure space
was, it was always fully subscribed, as all the DNA tests have been.
We used to talk about having a physics event about every third or
fourth shot to let the experimental physicists and experimenters
play with it, and do phenomenology, and physics.
Carothers: They still would have wanted a lot of space on the
next shot.
Wheeler: True. And, we never would have gotten a shot like
that funded, because we didn't have any system driving it.
Carothers: Were you getting participation from all three
services?
Wheeler: Pretty much, yes. As I recall, the Army participated
the least, probably because they didn't have systems other than the
Spartan and the Sprint. They didn't happen to have a system that
required that kind of testing. The Air Force was always there with
ICBM missile parts and materials. The Navy was there because of
their Polaris program, and there was always a lot of phenomenology
and materials effects experiments by contractors. And of course
Sandia, who developed components for weapons, was a big partici-
pant.
Carothers: Carl, you came to DNA in 1974. Perhaps this was
an issue that arose before you got there, and had reached some
conclusion. That was the question of what kind of tuff should you
shoot in. What should the porosity be, for example. Also there had
been a lot of fussing around with various kinds of grouts such as
superlean, and rock-matching, and so on.
Keller: Yes, before I got to DNA they had already concluded
that the rock needed to be saturated to give you the strongest
possible ground shock to the greatest range, and that the stemming
had to be as weak as necessary to allow closure of the LOS pipe as
far as possible. Now, those generalizations eventually led to, 1
believe, some serious stemming failures. It was true that they tried
to get the longest stemmed tunnel by maximizing the ground shock
and minimizing the grout strength.
The trouble with that concept was that you also, by reducing
the grout strength, suffered a lot of relief with grout extrusion into
this large pipe volume. So, it had no confining stress, and therefore
no strength, and it just had a ballistic trajectory. That was first
dramatically demonstrated on Hybla Fair, which was David Oakley's
attempt to push the state of the art. They overshot quite a bit. That
was a seventy-six foot long LOS pipe; it diverged to something like
five feet at the end, and there were no closures in it. The hope was
that there would be a ground shock stemming closure of the whole
pipe.
We did a parameter study with calculational models at Pac Tech
after that shot, and found that there's a very strong correlation
between the pipe taper and the amount of extrusion that you suffer.
According to the calculations, if you doubled the pipe taper you
started to see a small effect. If you went to four times the normal
pipe taper, you had a very dramatic effect. At five times the normal
pipe taper you just lost it completely. That was a calculational
parameter study that was done as part of the design of the low-yield
test concept.
Hybla Fair was premature, and there was talk about how it
might have actually killed the low-yield test concept, because it had
blown out so badly into the tunnel. But in fact, a couple of years
thereafter we dared to offer to pursue that, and we were allowed to
when funding was available. The intermediate tests were scaled
model tests done by Sandia. They put in the low-yield test design
and the Hybla Fair design side-by-side, and drove them with high
explosives. Those were scaled models which showed that Hybla Fair
failed, but the low-yield test concept didn't. The low-yield test
concept went all that way, and that was the only test design I know
of that ever evolved all the way from calculations, up through scale-
model tests, finally to nuclear proof-tests, and then to a follow-up
nuclear test.
After the FAC, the Fast Acting Closure, was developed by
Sandia we were sure we could go to double the normal pipe taper
easily, because the scaled models that were tested were at that
taper. Midnight Zephyr tested out that concept, and the proof of
that design was Diamond Ace, which had just a short part of the
pipe. Diamond Beech finally tested the whole thing. And then, just
about at that time Misty Rain and Mighty Oak occurred. The low-
yield test concept was then the only concept left in which DNA had
any faith. That test concept has been used many times since then.
So, that was an application of our calculational models, and our
experimental program, all the way from the smallest charges on up
through nuclear scale.
The low-yield concept was designed from scratch, whereas the
traditional LOS designs were developed in the field. The early tests
had difficulties, and the designs evolved very timidly. Of course,
they were all tested on the nuclear scale, where you didn't dare fail,
and so the standard HLOS design came about through timid
evolution in the field. And they started long before the calculational
models could treat the whole problem. Eventually the standard
design, as the product of that timid evolution, was proven not to
have the margin of safety that we'd become to believe.
Carothers: Well, DNA had been pretty successful with those
line-of-sight experiments for a few years. There were a series of
events where they worked.
Keller: Yes. There were some puzzles as to why the variations

occurred that did occur. It was never clear, at that time, what were
cause and effect situations. When we did HE tests at Physics
International where we were imploding pipes, we found that there
was a fairly strong variation in the standard unperturbed pipe in
those geometries. You had to have a major reduction of the flow
in the pipe before you could depend on it. 1 believe the analogy with
the nuclear experience is valid, because there we saw also variations
that we couldn't explain.
In fact, there were a few wagers. 1 remember that Dan Patch
bet two six-packs that Diablo Hawk would have a much more docile
behavior than Mighty Epic. Well, it shot out the doors and Mighty
Epic didn't. It wasn't bad though, and it was still well contained.
The next event was Misty Rain, and on that one, because the doors
were in closer, the pipe taper was larger, and there were a few other
things like that, Dan was sure that it was going to be a lot worse than
Diablo Hawk. And he lost again, because the doors held. Things
like that were really puzzling.
Weart: In the days when 1 was involved, almost all of the
experiments, while they were emplaced underground, were re-
corded on the surface, or outside at the portal. But as time went
on, more and more of the recording and the data acquisition began
to take place within the tunnel itself. Faster recording times were
desired, and there were cost efficiencies, and so forth. That made
an even greater premium on not letting any release out into the part
of the tunnel where the equipment was.
Carothers: When did you leave the containment business, and
go on to other things?
Weart: My last involvement was probably in the '74, '75 time
frame.
Carothers: By then a lot of things had been done to try to
insure that there was no release of radioactive material. What
changes were made after Baneberry?
Weart: Well, there were two kinds of changes. One involved
the engineered hardware - - building more massive, faster acting
closures, trying to get things across the Iine-of-sight pipe as quickly
as you could. Sandia has done a lot in terms of building big, fast-
acting closures for the DNA shots, for large diameter Iines-of-sight.
They have also done some HE closure work.
We also did a lot of work, along with DNA, in trying to insure
that the last line of defense, the overburden plugs, the gas-seal
doors, really would provide effective seals against high temperature
gases. We did a lot of work with Chuck Gulick, who worked for
Sandia, and we also worked with Waterways Experiment Station to
try and design cements which, for instance, were expansive, and
which would form a more positive seal against the rock. We did
quite a lot of work in that area.
The other advance that I think was made was in being able to
better understand and calculate the behavior of the various interact-
ing energy streams, such as the ground shock, and the pipe energy.
There was also a major effort instrumenting those events to try to
confirm whether or not our calculations were representing reality.
Carothers: I think that's an area where the tunnel events have
had an advantage, in that there is access. My impression is that there
was always a fair amount of instrumentation in the tunnels, looking
at the tunnel behavior and the medium behavior.
Weart: There were certainly advantages in the kind of things
you could do. The geometry afforded you a way of assuring that the
instruments lasted long enugh to get the data out, because you
didn't have to be right in the drill hole along the Iine-of-sight pipe.
So, ground motion measurements, free-field motions, energy flow
down the pipe using things like slifers, were much easier to do in
tunnel shots. We did try to do those things in the vertical LOS shots,
but it just wasn't as easy or as certain.
Smith: i had been involved in the DNA shots to the extent that
I would design the stress gauges for Bass, and help field them. C.
Wayne Cook did the recording of the data, and Bass would reduce
the data. All through those years I had my fingers in measurements
on DNA shots; principally the free-field stuff. Bass did the work on
the pipe, the pipe flow, and I was never involved in that. So, when
Bass retired, and G tunnel closed I just moved into the free-field
portion of his work, and Tom Bergstress took over the pipe flow
work. Of course, Bass is still the Grand Master of all that sort of
work. And so my work for the last few years has been more or less
on the DNA shots, the free-field measurements of stresses and
motions.
The original driver for that work in the intermediate regime
was, "What sort of stresses do we have loading these containment
structures?" That has broadened, now that those things are fairly
well known, into a number of things. One of them is failure
diagnostics. In case something happens, what measurements do we
have that would let us go back and assess what actually happened?
What was the pressure and temperature in a certain portion of the
pipe when the thing blew out?
The other sort of measurements are for trying to understand
what happens around the FAC. In other words, what are the stresses
and pressures in front of the FAC, and what is the interaction of the
ground shock with the stemming and the rock right around it. So,
the attempt is to measure those things, and to try to get a good
enough understanding of them so you get a good feel for why that
system works, and works fairly well. It's something that has evolved,
and it now seems to be a good system, but the community still
doesn't think it has a good feel for what the forces are that load the
FAC after the bomb goes.
DNA still has problems with gases that come trickling out into
the drift complex; there are late time leaks in there, and they would
very much like to know how long there are residual stresses loading
that portion of the stemming. So, it's the interaction of those things
that some of those measurements are used for now.
Carothers: Wendell, was this type of information useful to
you? Was there a clear enough understanding of what was going on
that you could say, "Look, see what's happening here? It shows us
this, and so we should make this change."
Weart: Well, we clearly used it. Some of it was more
immediately useful than others. Ground shock data, for instance,
was fairly easy to interpret, and it told us about how far out we could
expect high enough stresses to really squeeze down LOS systems,
and things of that sort. And we had shock velocities, which were
easily obtained, and easily used. Energy in the pipe? Not quite as
easy to interpret, because of the difficulties of getting measure-
ments that weren't ambiguous.
The easiest measurements to get were times of arrival, and

those you could usually get. But the relative magnitude of those
energies in the pipe compared to the ground shock energy was more
a matter of an active imagination than actual factual interpretation,
early on. But it was useful. It was useful in the sense that we could
tell in some pipes that the energy was just far outdistancing the
ground shock, and therefore we ought to try and do something to
slow it down, and minimize it. While we couldn't get a good handle
on the energy levels, we could get a good handle on times of arrival,
and that led to lots of schemes to try and do things within the pipe
structure itself to slow this energy down ; things like mufflers,
baffles, helixes, and so forth.
Carothers: You mentioned Baneberry as the event which
brought to everyone's attention the importance of the details of the
geology around the working point. But you know, Wendell, if I
wanted to be a cynic I could say, "You guys didn't learn anything
in the six months between Baneberry and when you started to shoot
tunnel shots again, so what was different? You didn't have any new
knowledge. All you had was somebody pointing his finger at you
and saying, 'You better not!'" So what happened?
Weart: Well, I think there was a concerted effort on the part
of DNA to locate their tunnel events in tuff which had a high sonic
velocity. And so there was an effort to select locations which would
be on the favorable side of that particular aspect. Areas which
clearly had high gas-filled porosity, which might lead to, or at least
were often associated with, lower velocities were avoided. And
since this had always been one of the factors that had been primarily
responsible, that was a step in the right direction.
There were changes in the backfill, things like the specially
designed grouts which would transmit the shock well, but which had
weak strengths so they would flow easily, and not resist the closure
of the pipe. There were changes like that which were made in that
time frame, after Baneberry. I don't know that there was any one
event when all of these things came to be applied at the same time.
It was sort of an evolution.
I think it's clearly true that was when the major changes came.
And there were changes in how the line-of-sight pipe itself was
designed, but it was never clear, at least to me, what role those
changes played in the successes.
Carothers: Do you think the better containment was princi-

pally due to the attention to the geology and stemming, or do you
think it was the the fast closures, and the valves, and so on?
Weart: I tend to think it's not the engineering features that
makes a containment success. In my view, if you need those things,
in part you've really failed. They may succeed in providing
protection for the experiments, so from the DNA standpoint
they're essential, and I guess there have been instances where they
have made the difference in a successful experiment. I really can't
judge what improvements in later years have done; I'm just not
familiar with what has gone on recently.
Carothers: Well, there were changes that were made following
Baneberry that really improved things. If you compare the two or
three years after Baneberry with the two or three years before,
there's a striking difference, both in the tunnels and with the events
in the drilled holes.
Weart: Yes, and I think those successes were probably not due,
in large part, to the mechanical hardware, from what I can recall.
When you had a success you would go back in, and you would find
that significant amounts of radioactivity, of molten material didn't
reach those features. If significant amounts of energy did reach the
features, they often weren't successful. So, you really need to do
your containment, and I would say ninety percent of it, before you
get to those features.
Carothers: And that you do with the energy of the device
itself, and to use that energy properly you select your geology
properly.
Weart: That's right.
Carothers: Why didn't we understand that in sixties? Was it
that it wasn't important enough?
Weart: I think it's human nature. We had had a couple of
successes, and so we said, "It's working, why change anything? We
know enough."
Carothers: Well, you can always blame it on the management.
You might go and say, "We really should understand this better,"
and get the response, "Why should I spend money on that, Wendell?
You're doing fine. Keep up the good work."
Weart: Well, it's funny. People did continue to support

measurements. We always had active measurement programs on
those tunnel shots, even though things seemed to have worked okay.
So, people were trying to learn a little more. It may have been in
part fear that, because we did understand so little, we were reluctant
to make a change that we thought might be right, but maybe it
wasn't. We didn't have the understanding to say that. It looks so
obvious today to say that yes, this is going to have advantageous
aspects. In those days there were people who probably argued
strong ground shocks are bad. We just had not examined the
phenomenon enough to have a good enough understanding to take
a chance on something that was quite different. When it became
clear that the old ways weren't good enough, then nobody minded
taking the chances.
Carothers: Byron, the DNA, for the last twenty or more years,
has sponsored a variety of containment related experiments, calcu-
lations, and measurements. More so, I think, than either Los
Alamos or Livermore.
Ristvet: Yes. It had to do with there being a different
philosophy. The Labs, since they got out of the vertical LOS
business, learned how to do what they wanted to do without
bringing the pipe to the surface And they also turned over, in some
cases, the re-entry vehicle testing they used to do on some of those
vertical shots, to DNA. Their concerns were different, and they
were much less concerned with sample protection. DNA's research
program has been driven by experiment protection and equipment
protection, and also trying to preserve the tunnel complex, because
that's a valuable resource.
453
17
Pipe Closure Hardware
An integral part of the sample protection and containment

design of line-of-sight pipes has been the installation of various
massive pieces of hardware, designed to impede or stop the flow of
material down the pipe after the detonation. Sandia has done exten-
sive engineering and test work in the development of the various
closure devices.
Wheeler: The first of what we called an auxiliary closure was
prototyped and built by Sandia for DNA. We called them auxiliary
closures because we took the ground shock to be the main pipe
closure mechanism.
That was about 1972, after the DNA fast-door blew up, and
didn't work when it was tested.. Lockheed Shipyard, in Seattle, was
building a big steel contraption to close off the line-of-sight very
rapidly. It was a big housing with two opposing doors on parallel
tracks. They first obscured the line-of-sight, and then closed flat
and sealed the whole area, the whole aperture. They drove it
explosively, to get the closure time they wanted. I don't know
whether somebody miscalculated, or whether they didn't under-
stand what they were using, but as I recall they used something in
excess of forty pounds of bulls-eye pistol powder to try to close
these doors. When they tested it, it wasn't surrounded by concrete,
or the earth, or anything else, and it just blew all to hell. That was
the death of that program.
At that time Sandia came along and said, "We can provide you
with doors that will do almost everything you want done." And they
did. And in a number of ways Sandia has continued to be a great
contributor to the horizontal tests, particularly in the closure
mechanisms.
Carothers: Did they receive DNA funds for that, or was that
something they did within their own Laboratory?
Wheeler: I think the first that was built they did within their
own Laboratory, and they asked DNA if they could install it on the
event to test it. That was a significant thing, because it allowed us
to get away from the old explosively-driven debris barrier system —

a high explosive machine which created a lot of shrapnel, and
sometimes tore up a lot of the experiments. Certainly the explosive
products didn't help the Iine-of-sight any. So, those fast gates were
a significant contribution that Sandia made.
Broyles: We designed the basic concept of the sliding doors for
Cypress, in '68, and repeated it for Camphor, and continued the
development effort on those things until the mid-seventies. We
then concluded it wasn't likely we were going to go back to that,
because Sandia wasn't sponsoring more shots. We had essentially
disbanded that group when DNA came, with a letter from their top
person, asking us to please use our unique capabilities to support
their program. So, we reactivated the group, and have been
essentially designing the hardware for DNA tests ever since, and
continuing to make improved versions of that hardware, jerry
Kennedy's department has had that responsibility.
Carothers: I've always thought those various closures were
very impressive things. So much moves so fast.
Broyles: Yes. And you should remember that those designs
from the beginning were to be debris stoppers. Any absolute late-
time containment of gases was a benefit. Somewhere along the way
somebody decided that instead of having this big TAPS (Tunnel and
Pipe Seal), which we still have for the DNA tests, you could save
money, millions of dollars, if you could really make the second
closure a gas seal. So that led to redesigning to incorporate a
positive gas seal in that closure. Several of those, called the Gas Seal
Auxiliary Closure, or GSAC, have been fielded, but they still
encounter new problems each time.
People still don't have a very scientific basis for what the
strength of those sliding doors should be. Some number like fifteen
thousand psi was sort of the static containment pressure strength
that they came up with. It was more maybe from the fact that that's
what you could build, but you could make some arguments that led
to numbers of that order. The real thing was to get a lot of mass.
Now there's a big effort going on to improve that design. That
door is a twelve-inch thick forging, hollowed out for weight.
Essentially you have a bridge truss for strength, and a certain
Pipe Closure Hardware 455
thickness to stop projectiles. All of those designs were still

envisioned as backups for the primary closure, which was still to be
the ground shock.
On the newer test designs, where instead of just those fast
gates, there is the HE closure, the FAC, or Fast Acting Closure,
which is a much more substantial block, much closer in. I think that
has much more direct influence on the containment per se than the
other hardware.
Bass: I'm very proud of the FAC, because I was one of the two
designers of it. That was a perfect marriage between experiment
and calculation. I did the theoretical calculation work - - the two
dimensional calculations - - on the FAC. At the same time Paul
Cooper did high explosive simulations at tenth scale. We operated
absolutely separately, except we started from the same principles,
and we had certain ground rules to go by. We compared our results
on a Christmas Eve afternoon. We both went home and thought we
had a Christmas present, because they had cut into the plug left by
the latest simulation firing, and every single place that the calcula-
tions had predicted a failure in the spool, they were shown in the
explosive test. You could see every crack, every single rebound, any
spallation was duplicated. Everything was exactly the same between
the calculations and the experiment. We immediately dropped scale
model testing and went to full scale test. We estimated to DOE that
we saved one to two million dollars by this jump.
One thing it did cause us to do was to turn the detonation point
around because we saw we had a weak point. DNA wanted it
detonated on the working point end, and we said, "No, because
you're putting a very weak structure there, and you're spalling
things back at the bulkhead end, so where's the stopper?" So we
turned around and detonated on the portal end, coming forward,
and then used that as a basis to allow us to make an ogive front end.
This was all done calculationally and experimentally in parallel, and
I considered that my greatest triumph in calculations. You can do
marvelous things with hydro codes if you're lucky.
Keller: The FAC, the fast acting closure, the thirty-inch HE
machine, was developed as part of that low-yield test design. The
concept was that you would not try to close the pipe where it was
so large, because once you closed it, if the grout didn't come to rest,
or wasn't confined, it just flowed on down the LOS pipe and you lost
it. The concept was to build the big end of the pipe so strong that
you couldn't lose it — a hardened pipe section is what it was called.
And, near the working point where the pipe was small, you put in
a relatively strong grout and swaged it with the very high ground
shock that you had that close-in. So, you developed a short, high
quality closure, that plugged the LOS pipe which closed in a
millisecond. That served as an absolute plug, so you could not
extrude the grout through that hole. And so, as long as the HE
machine was closed, and the hardened pipe structure was intact, you
had a competent system.
Sandia did the scale model tests. We specified what geometry
we wanted, and they built and fielded the scale model tests for the
low-yield test concept. They also built our MAC'S and the FAC
according to our specifications. They did probably a hundred half-
scale and fifth-scale HE tests, during the evolution of the FAC. If
we'd had to pay the full price of those, at a contractor, it would have
added a lot to our budget.
Carothers: Dan, do you get involved in location of the big
mechanical closures? Do you do calculations of the stresses you
expect them to see?
Patch: Oh yes. That's a very important part of what we're
doing. In a way that's almost the central part. Another aspect of
that is we really think a lot about what an appropriate piece of
hardware is, and where should it go in the pipe string. Sometimes
we run into a situation where we really need to have a closure, and
it's up to us, working with Joe LaComb and Byron Ristvet to say,
"This pipe string is not going to be safe unless we have a closure
here, here, and here." If we don't have a closure that will fit at those
places, then we either have to take one off the shelf, move it till it
fits, and then see if it can stand the loads there, and it may not. If
that's the case, then we really try to be closely involved in saying,
"These are the performance criteria that we need for new closures."
We've talked with Sandia for many years about their closure
design program. For example, this Fast Acting Closure that we see
all the time on the low yield shots; we really were the ones that said
such a device was needed, and kind of ballparked what the specs
ought to be. Sandia folks thought about how they would go about
making such a thing, and did the engineering analysis, which was a
substantial job. We did the 2-D design calculations, so when they
said, "We need a spool that's about so thick," we took a look at their
design and said, "Yeah, you're going to have to put so much HE on
the outside, because it's going to close on this kind of a time scale."
They took that information and went to small scale, and tuned it up
and made it work. They carried the lion's share, but we worked back
and forth interactively on what was needed, how it worked, and how
to really build the thing.
Carothers: When they wanted bigger pipe tapers, they had to
move the hardware in closer because the opening in the doors had
a certain diameter, and you had to move the system forward to
where it fit the pipe.
Patch: Mechanically, that's what you have to do, but if you do
that the risk to the hardware goes up almost exponentially as you
move in, depending on what the threat is.
Carothers: But they did do that, because they were going to
bigger pipe tapers.
Patch: They did do that, but now they've moved things back.
But it's different hardware too, with this Fast Acting Closure
machine, which is very different than the gate closures, in some
respects at least. It closes in a millisecond, which is a factor of thirty
times faster than the gates. That's not so germane to it's survival,
but it's just one big slug of material that gets in the way, as opposed
to the gates, which are more of a diaphragm configuration. Sandia
has done a lot of work in the last couple of years to really bring up
the strength of those gate doors. Of course, they've worked on that
for many, many years, but I think what they've done recently is
going in the right direction.
Carothers: It seems that the hardware now is going in the
direction of brute forcing the problem. They're trying to make the
hardware so strong that it will survive whatever it sees, much like the
overburden plugs.
Patch: Yes. But there's a lot of finesse that may not be
obvious, and that comes in getting this big, brutal piece of hardware
in the way without giving up the timing. One can easily put more
stuff in the way, but it's not so easy to get it in the way on the right
time scale. These machines are fairly sophisticated in the design.
They're going to the very limits of the materials.
Carothers: When you talk about the timing, are you talking
about the material coming down the pipe, or are you talking about
the collapse of the pipe.
Patch: We're really talking about the collapse of the pipe. The
gates are too slow to catch the front end of stuff that comes down
the pipe. They may be able to catch the back part of it. In cases
where we've apparently had too much pipe flow you can see it
interact with the doors, in terms of slowing them down. So, they're
catching the back part of the flow, and that's the more threatening
part, in my mind, because it seems to be more massive, more
capable of really loading things. The first stuff that comes down is,
I think, a pretty faint wisp. It's very energetic material, but it's very
low density. I suspect it dissipates and plates itself out, literally,
inside the pipe as it goes down the pipe.
Kennedy: The debris barrier system had gates that set parallel
to the walls of the pipe, inside the pipe, so they were curved. They
were explosively driven to close. They had interlocking fingers, but
sometimes they just went on through instead of locking. They
didn't work very well, and sometimes they made shrapnel that
damaged the experiments. I'm not sure who designed them —
whether it was Lockheed, or DNA in conjunction with Lockheed.
DNA also uses a closure that was designed by Lockheed that is
called the TAPS, the tunnel and pipe seal, which is supposed to be
a late time gas seal. This is a great big toilet seat cover like thing,
where the cover is latched up, and at zero time is dropped by gravity
to slam closed. It's very slow; it takes of the order of a second to
close, so any fast debris is long gone before it latches. Sometimes
it hasn't latched and sealed because some of the debris which had
gotten there was deposited on the seat, or it didn't fall all the way
down.
One closure we developed and used on Cypress was an HE
driven vertical closure. The gate was put up above the line of sight.
Being that it was explosive driven, it came down like a guillotine at
a pretty high speed, and seated at the bottom. I don't remember
the exact closure time. We built and tested that at Oak Ridge. It
was a huge, massive gate. It was an immense monster of a thing.
About that time, the group then working for Howard Viney
started designing these gates that were driven horizontally so they
overlaid each other. They were fast acting gates, HE driven. Then
they decided that you could do that more safely by driving them
with high pressure gas, rather than HE. You could regulate the
pressure, it had lots of safety features, and you didn't have to have
quantities of explosives around. That design was all Sandia's, and
we paid for a lot of it ourselves, because it was for our own test,
Camphor. DNA was very interested in those gates, and we started
providing them for their tests too. They started kicking in funding
to help our level of design effort for those closures.
Those gates have continued to be developed to this day. Each
of the doors in current years is about a foot thick, and weighs about
five thousand pounds, even with all of the holes that are drilled in
them to lighten them up, while you try to maintain structural
strength. These gates come in various sizes, but they are usually
designed for either a 60 or 72 inch diameter pipe. They obscure
the line of sight in about 1 7 milliseconds.
Carothers: That's a thing that has always impressed me. Here
are these big, massive pieces of hardware, and they work as fast as
a camera shutter.
Kennedy: John Weydert, who was one of our great designers
of these things loved to say, " I f you stood 20 feet or so on the other
side of the door, and you aimed your 45 at me and pulled the
trigger, and 1 pulled the trigger on the doors at the same time, I'd
be safe." The doors would close before the bullet got there. A n d
he also likened the problem of stopping them to taking a Cadillac at
a hundred and fifty miles an hour and trying to stop it in about six
inches without damaging it. Starting them was a lot easier than
stopping them, it turned out. It was a real problem, absorbing all
that energy, and decelerating those things, and making them stop
where you wanted them to instead of either going on to China, or
rebounding. Either way is bad. That was really the hard part of the
design, absorbing that energy, and having them stop in closed
position. So, 1 7 milliseconds is when they overlap, and it's around
30 milliseconds for a complete closure.
Carothers: And you had those on Camphor?

Kennedy: Yes. That was about the first time they were used.
The thing in the history of the development of the fast closures
that always stood out to me was the fact that we did provide those
for DNA. They did help fund them. We jointly funded a lot of the
development work, because we felt for a long time that we might still
have a need for them. But sometime after Camphor, a couple of
years, during the early seventies, was hard times for the Laborato-
ries.
Carothers: There were. We had layoffs in the early seventies.
Kennedy: Yes. So there was a lot of pulling in of the horns.
One of those was to say, "Well, we're not going to fund to develop
fast closures any more, because we don't think we're going to use
them anymore. If DNA wants to do that, they ought to take care
of it." We were under contract with them to provide some closures
through some shot that 1 don't now remember. I had the duty to
go back East to tell DNA that we were going to get out of this
business. We would honor our commitments through this particular
event, and we would see to the fielding of that hardware, and so
forth, but we were giving them this warning. In the future they
would have to see to having that done by somebody else. They said,
"But we want you to do that. What should we do about that?" And
I said, "If I were you, I would get the highest person I could get in
this place to talk to the highest person he could talk to at my place,
and tell him that they would really like for us not to quit doing this
work, and make the argument." And, in fact, that's exactly what
they did.
Carothers: There were also some things that were used which
were called HE machines. Did you people at Sandia do those
designs, and tests, also?
Kennedy: Yes. We early on had so-called HE machines. On
Camphor we called them dimple machines. They were in on a close-
in section of the Iine-of-sight. We put like a shaped, or platter
charge on the side wall of the pipe. We started with one, and then
put one at 90 degrees a little further down, and another one at 90
more degrees, so when they went off they just made the pipe go
criss-cross to obstruct the line of sight. All they were supposed to
do was to make a mess, and delay any hyper-velocity flow that might
want to come down there and get the other hardware. They were
just supposed to cause a delay, and a temporary obstruction. It
wasn't containment. Nobody even pretended that they thought
those things could do that, but they ought to slow down the flow.
460a
Fast Acting Closure or FAC.
•*?--
~w
460b
Modified Auxiliary Closure or MAC.

In more recent years there was a concerted effort here, funded

by DNA in large part, to develop these fast acting closures - - the
FAC's. They are a great big spool of aluminum and lead and steel
which is HE driven. The HE is carefully designed to close the line-
of-sight at the point where it's about thirty inches in diameter, and
to close it in about a millisecond.
Carothers: Basically it implodes the pipe?
Kennedy: Yes, there is a cylindrical implosion of a big, thick-
walled section of the pipe. It is not just a standard section of the
Iine-of-sight pipe. It is an especially designed spool of aluminum,
principally, driven by about four hundred pounds of high explo-
sives. It implodes this spool, and causes a four or five foot length
of solid copper and aluminum to be in the line of sight. It just makes
a solid plug.
Ristvet: The various auxilary closures have evolved very
carefully. They are related to sample protection, and there's a lot
of engineering that has gone into them. That's been a unique thing
that Sandia has done for DNA over the years, and done very well.
The FAC is just an extension of the Livermore HE machine design,
but done in a manner that reduced jetting significantly, and
improved things which the Livermore designs were not too good at.
Giving credit where credit is due, Olden Burchet and Harold Walling
and all the rest of the crew at Sandia have been a great group to work
with over the years. John Weydert also worked well with metallur-
gists, and the explosives people, because they were all in the same
group. And Jerry Kennedy held that group together for years. It
was just an excellent mix of people that had a very 'can do' attitude.
We would set the criteria, and the basic criteria was to catch the pipe
flow.
Incidently, Sandia told Carl Keller that those doors wouldn't
handle the stress loads from the grout as you moved them in. Where
we used to have them on Diablo Hawk and Mighty Epic and those
shots was really about as close in as you could get and still have only
a little less than a factor of one and a half engineering design safety
in the doors. It's interesting that they were able to develop a
reinforced door that actually almost doubled the effective strength
of the doors, the flexure strength. We tested that on Distant Zenith,
and it worked fine.
Carothers: Those doors have been driven with high pressure

gas. 1 have always thought that was a dangerous procedure. A
fifteen, twenty thousand psi gas system is a scary thing.
Ristvet: What's really scary is having a leak in the system, and
not being able to shut the doors.
I think the highest pressure we ever used was eighteen thousand
one hundred psi. We have had very good engineering people from
Sandia, who were experts in high pressure gas systems. The gas
systems were always assembled and tested beforehand. The tunnel
was evacuated for that area, except for the two Sandia people who
would test the system after it was installed. Then, before it was
pressurized again it would be fully grouted in. So, except right at
the compressor, which was in a secure, shielded area, there was no
potential for harm to people except for the two or so that would be
working right on the system. That's the same way you would do a
high pressure experiment in the laboratory. You try to minimize
those dangers, but you're absolutely correct. They are there.
Carothers: Why didn't you drive the doors with propellents?
Ristvet: I always wanted to. We have had a program going with
people in Olden Burchett's group at Sandia. It turns out water-gel
explosives work better than propellents. And they're much more
reliable than gas systems, in a sense, and you don't have the
exposure of people to high pressure gases and things like that.
I think if we had some of the explosives folks that we now have
at Sandia involved in the early days of development we probably
would have used a fast propellent, or a slow explosive. I emphasize
slow. You want the generation of gas to be a little faster than a
propellent, but not as fast as an RDX or PETN explosive. There are
explosives that are used for various metal-forming applications that
would be the right mix to use. We actually got as far as doing scaled
tests at Sandia.
Carothers: This was going to be on the next shot?
Ristvet: Yes, it would have definitely been on one door, on
Mighty Uncle.
Bass: Now, there's a containment rule — a sample protection

containment rule. If the doors hold for a hundred plus milliseconds
you've got no problems. After that it doesn't hurt you if they let
?o.
Half the MAC doors have been taken out in the history of the
test program. All of them except Mighty Oak and Misty Rain went
out close to a hundred milliseconds. We know that from data.
We've had light beams going across the pipe, we've had pressure
gauges back there, and it's been my job for years to unsnarl all that
garbage.
Dan Patch has called this flow of stemming that hits the doors
core flow, and joe goes through the ceiling because nobody really
knows what core flow is. This core flow is tempered by the doors
lasting that long. Then, when it takes out that door it has lost
enough energy that by the time it gets to the GSAC it won't take
it out. The GSAC has approximately 8 0 0 0 psi strength. The M A C
had approximately 10000 psi strength — if it closed. If it is not
closed, all bets are off. Then it's just two cantilevered hunks of iron.
It's got some strength, but we can't even estimate what it is.
There is a new M A C now, called the STAC, Stemming Anchor
Closure. It has been developed as a result of a small working group
of me, Dan Patch, and Ed Peterson, where we designed a new closure
to prevent the Mighty Oak problem. The main change for this
closure is that the doors have steel front and back plates on them,
and it can hold probably three kilobars.
Carothers: If it's closed.
Bass: If it's closed. But we can get it closed, because we can
drive it explosively. There's no reason not to drive that with
propellant. The M A C and GSAC are driven with helium. Originally
they were driven with nitrogen, but they changed to helium to get
more specific energy. But it turns out that the primacord that blew
the tanks that held the gas was providing over half the energy. So
really, we were ddoing a lot of the driving with primacord all the
time.
Carothers: If it were my tunnel, I would look very dubious at
you coming in and wanting to put fifteen or twenty thousand psi gas
bottles in there.
Bass: It's the most dangerous part of the test program. It's
much more dangerous than the FAC sitting there with four hundred
pounds or so of TNT in it. We're going to drive them explosively
in the future, and propellants are pretty safe to handle.
Well, I should say that some work has been done, but the Tiger
Team visit to Sandia stopped this last event from having propellant
drive. The laboratories were closed, for ESscH purposes, or that
work would have been done.
465
18
Pipe Flow
With the resumption of testing in 1961 some events with a

horizontal, and some with a vertical Iine-of-sight were conducted,
principally for effects experiments of one kind or another. Here the
need for a calculational capability to design an opening that would
allow the desired radiation to reach the samples to be exposed, while
simultaneously containing the radioactive materials and protecting
the samples, quickly became apparent.
Over the approximately eight years that vertical line-of-sight
events were conducted before Baneberry some four out of five
released activity. Some releases were small, and confined to the
Test Site; many were detected off-site.
Carothers: Who designed the pipe string on the Livermore
vertical line-of-sight events? Who said what the front-end should
be, or what kind of closure hardware there should be?
Hudson: I think the design was somewhat, I shouldn't say
happenstance, but it wasn't engineered or designed on the basis of
a lot of information. It was more or less a farmer's approach to a
problem.
Carothers: "Let's put a big valve in about there."
Hudson: That's right. "Let's close that pipe with high
explosives." And those ideas were good, but they didn't know
where to put these things, by and large. So they decided putting
them in close must be better than farther away. "Let's stop that
monster as far down as we can." As a result, most of the early
closures were blown right out of the pipe, like a bullet through a gun,
because they were in a region where the energy density was too
great. As they were moved farther away, they worked better. And
that's probably when people realized that, "Hey, maybe there is
enough of a basis for science and engineering here that we ought to
have a containment group."
We've revisited those old designs several times. I don't recall,

at the moment, what our findings were, other than a big recollection
that the primary problems of those events was that they tried to stop
things too close to the source.
Keller: At Los Alamos 1 looked very hard at the LOS pipe flow
measurements that were available, and they were terrible flow
measurements. They put the gauges on the pipe, fired the shot, and
the gauges gave you gibberish or they went off the air. There was
no really serious effort to measure flows in pipes. You would
discover after a couple of efforts, which took a couple of years, that
the gauges they were using were heat sensitive, and so the declining
pressures you saw at strange times was because you were heating the
gauge. And a lot of the gauges were shock sensitive, and they
screwed them into the pipe wall, so when the pipe wall was racked
by the ground shock it would warp the gauge body and you'd get this
funny stuff. It was really kind of discouraging how long, how very
long, it was before pipe flow measurements ever became reliable. It
was ten years later. I think the first really good set of pipe flow
measurements were on Diablo Hawk, which was in '78. Ten years
later.
Carothers: Did you also do pipe flow calculations?
Keller: No. We did do the design of the front-end on all the
Los Alamos events. The first ones were actually designed with 1-
D codes. I calculated lots of slices to determine what the probable
2-D behavior was. The current design is different in aspect ratio,
and so forth, but it was really started about the time of Door Mist.
It evolved from that point to the larger reverse cones, the longer,
more slender front-end cones, and things like that. But it evolved
rather slowly.
After I had been at the Lab about two years, Chick Keller
joined up; that must have been about '68 or so. Chick's job was to
do front-end calculations in two dimensions, and he came in just as
eager as he could be to really do them right. He calculated the
designs in two dimensions, and after a couple of years he expressed
a lot of frustration because the designs that were developed with the
1-D codes were relatively optimum. There was almost nothing he
could offer that would be a major improvement. The phase velocity
and everything had been determined with ID slices, and so the 2-
D codes only confirmed the 1-D code designs.
<•'$,
Pipe Flow 467
And the concept was resilient. Because of our level of

ignorance we wanted it to be resilient. We didn't want it to be
sensitive to device performance or anything else. There were some
changes in things, but generally speaking it was just a very slow
evolution of those designs. The biggest changes were dictated by
experimental conditions like the aperture that was used on Cowles.
It was huge compared to the norm, so that necessitated a different
design, but it was not driven by any real revelation from 2-D
calculations.
In ' 6 9 to ' 7 0 I was designing Manzanas and Cowles and Yerba
There was also Snubber in there, and I designed the front-end of
Snubber. Ajo was a test for that front-end design, and it worked
fine. But there's more to a containment design than the front-end,
as we found out on Snubber, and as DNA has found out recently.
Carothers: In those days it seemed as though at every CEP
meeting I went to there was an interminable series of viewgraphs
made from computer plots, with someone saying, "Well, here you
have such and such, and now you see . . ."
Keller: Yes, energy ahead of ground shock, and all that.
Marshall Berman, Chick Keller, ]ose Cortez - - all those guys at that
time were calculating front-ends mightily. There were a lot of front-
end calculations. One interesting thing about all those pipe flow
calculations, and front-end calculations, was that there was not a
realization in those days that most of the energy flowing up the pipe
was actually generated by the ground shock collapse of the pipe. It
was thought that it came through the front-end. You could
aggravate circumstances by a poor front-end design, but a good
design certainly never got rid of the ground shock generation of
jetted material.
I went through all of that stuff before the CEP presentation of
Huron King, more thoroughly than I had ever done it before, and
1 was surprised to find that asymmetric designs were fairly popular
in the days of Eagle, and Finfoot, and Tee, and Backswing - - the
vertical line-of-sight shots. There were a number of things they were
doing wrong in those days, and they didn't realize it. One was that
they put the HE machine three meters above the saviour.
Carothers: What was the saviour?
'''-•>.
Duff: That was an asymmetric pipe closure system. It was a

big, massive C-shaped steel pipe with ribs on it, like gear teeth, so
it was non-uniform. The fourth side was closed by a relatively thin,
flat plate. The idea was that the flat plate would jam in much faster
than the other walls would. It was the kind of thing which has been
talked about subsequently on a number of occasions, but in the
DNA program we use axially symmetric things, largely because we
can calculate them.
Keller: I'm sure something they didn't appreciate at that time
was that the source region extends out as far as the full cavity region
- - out to the six kilobar range. And so they would put everything
in the first third of the source region but nothing thereafter.
Harry Reynolds wrote a paper on the apparent success or
failure of HE machines. His conclusion was that you had to be
outside of the cavity radius. He didn't know why that had to be the
range, but you had to be outside of the cavity range for an HE
machine to be very effective. They had placed the HE machines
from just a few meters above the can to farther and farther out, and
they never seemed to do much until they got out to a certain
distance. I read that with amusement, because about a year before
we'd done experiments at Physics International which showed that
the ground shock implosion of the pipe generated a magnificent jet
when you were in the six kilobar range. That happens to be a little
bit beyond the cavity radius. And so this paper that was written by
Harry Reynolds had all this wisdom in it, which was supported later
on when we discovered what was really going on. His conclusions
were right, but he was a bit baffled by why they were true.
And there was an external helix on one of the Livermore
events, but I didn't know that. I also had put a helix on the outside
of the pipe on Cowles. Now I know that the external helix on Cowles
was ineffective. I'm sure of that, because when I went to DNA we
started doing experiments of that kind. Those tests we later did at
Physics International showed that an external helix worked fine for
an HE imploded pipe, but it didn't work at all for a ground shock
imploded pipe. There was absolutely no effect from some of the
strongest asymmetries on the outside of the pipe.
Pipe Flow 469
Duff: Probably the most relevant thing that I did of a

containment nature while I was at Livermore was on Alva and
Backswing, where we diagnosed the performance of the front-end
hardware. That's something that hasn't been done since. Interest-
ingly enough, we got an indication of the pressure in the iron of the
saviour, and it was somewhere between 100 and 500 kilobars. We
could tell by the velocity of the shock wave that was involved. And
the velocity of the jet coming up the pipe was two centimeters per
microsecond in the closure itself, and that number is the same as
DNA is getting these days.
The first events to use a horizontal line-of-sight in tunnels for
weapons effects studies were Logan (1958), Marshmallow (1962),
and Gumdrop (1965). It was in 1966 that the DNA began an
extensive series of effects shots in tunnels in Rainier Mesa. Most
of these used a horizontal vacuum pipe that diverged from a few
inches in diameter near the device to several feet in diameter at the
far end, which might be as much as a thousand feet away from the
source. Stations for various exposures levels and experiments could
be located along the pipe. Some experiments recorded data as the
radiation from the device struck the detectors, and were finished
within microseconds. Others involved the reentry and recovery of
exposed samples and components, and their success depended on
being protected from ground shock, damage by projectiles, high
pressures and temperatures, and contamination by device debris.
The design of the line-of-sight system thus involves letting the
prompt radiation from the device into the pipe, and then closing it
in such a way that other material does not flow down the pipe and
damage or destroy the experiments being done. Further, the tunnel
complex should be protected, principally from radioactive contami-
nation, so it can be used for future experiments. And, extensive
amounts of recording instrumentation and equipment, whose loss
would be quite costly, are usually located in the tunnel. Finally,
there is to be no release of radioactive material to the atmosphere.
The proper design of the line-of-sight system is crucial to the
accomplishment of all these purposes, except possibly the last. It
has been demonstrated that massive concrete plugs placed in the
tunnel can, if properly designed and installed, prevent release of
radioactive gases even if there is direct and open communication
between the cavity and the tunnel complex.
The first design problem is to allow the prompt radiation from

the device to enter the pipe, and then to close the close-in portion of
the pipe, called the front-end, to prevent device debris from enter-
ing.
Carothers: Chuck, might it be fair to say the way front-ends
are today is largely due to you?
Dismukes: Well, front-end design has been my primary
occupation since about 1965, but I think that would be giving me
a little too much credit. Of course, we have to take the blame when
they don't work; they're not all successes. If I'm going to take some
of the blame, I certainly want some of the credit for the ones that
worked.
Carothers: Seems fair.
Dismukes: We haven't been totally successful. And, that's a
major question; when things don't work right, what went wrong?
That's something 1 don't think we know the answer to.
Carothers: When you talk about front-ends, how far along the
pipe does the front-end extend? When does it stop being the front-
end?
Dismukes: That is also an issue, and it has varied over the years.
It was often a time frame of a hundred microseconds or so where we
would try to describe the phenomena. At that point the shock might
have propagated on the order of a meter outside the zero room into
the stemming. As the designs evolved we came up with this
thickened pipe wall, a heavy-walled pipe which is sometimes called
a reverse cone, or extension. That's grown in length over the years,
and now it's out to a few meters. We try to carry the calculations
and analysis out to where the shock has reached that range, or
beyond. Typically we've looked out to half a millisecond to a
millisecond.
Carothers: What factors do you try to include, and what do
you try to do out to that half millisecond or so?
Dismukes: The basic concept is simple. We're talking about
line-of-sight events, primarily for x-ray experiments, but they don't
have to be. We're viewing a portion of the output of the device
through a small pipe. We want to maintain this view until the device
has put out its prompt radiation, and it has had time to go through
Pipe Flow 471
the system. That's typically ten nanoseconds or less. It's very

quick, so we don't need the pipe to stay open very long. Then, at
that point we want to close that pipe as rapidly as possible, to
prevent device debris and radiation we aren't interested in from
coming down the pipe.
The basic concept is to create a a sequential set of valves, or
closures. In order to close things fast you have to vaporize them,
get them very hot. And they won't stay around forever because
they're basically just a dense gas. So, we try to follow that with a
little denser gas, and a little denser, and eventually some liquid, and
eventually solid material which we hope will survive and begin to
form the permanent closure of the pipe. The whole system is
designed to produce a continuous, but only semipermanent closure
of gradually increasing integrity. It's length times density, and the
cooler the better, but it's hard to get material in quickly and keep
it cool. Most of our systems, at least the way we calculate them,
come apart after we've closed them, but over a long period of time.
By then we hope to have created the ground shock closure of the
pipe further out.
Carothers: What's the purpose of this reverse cone that wasn't
there originally, then gradually got there, and got longer, and as I
recall changed material a couple of times?
Dismukes: In the early days we essentially just had a pipe
sticking into a box and we worried about getting the front of that
pipe closed. There was stemming basically up to what we call the
portal end of the box, and the pipe was just there. We noticed that
when the shock propagated into the medium, the stemming tended
to provide a low density path between the hot zero room and the
pipe. The place where we were trying to form a plug in the pipe was
just very hot, and of a low density. Because the shock was strong
and the stemming was of insufficient density to really resist it, we
might have a good plug at the front of the pipe, but this could be
bypassed, leaving the remaining pipe open, potentially, to the zero
room.
Carothers: The pipe was being closed basically with the pipe
material and some grout?
Dismukes: Even worse, in the process of closing components
closer to the bomb we were producing a fair amount of energetic
flow, which we call plasma, which was jetting up the pipe. This stuff
was interacting with the pipe before the ground shock got there, and
blowing it out significantly. So, it was a lot larger when the ground
shock did arrive, and that made it harder to close. That whole
process led to some very tenuous looking curtains of material
between the open LOS and the hot zero room. We noticed right
away that we ought to try to do something about that. Initially we
just put in a couple of feet of thick-walled iron pipe. That helped,
so we decided to make it longer, because we noticed that just
beyond the end of that thick walled section, again the pipe was
exploding.
The impedance of the metal was enough to inhibit the explo-
sion of the pipe, so it didn't get as large before the ground shock
arrived. That's the basic concept. Also, when you do close it, the
material comes in more gently because of its higher density. So, it
doesn't get as hot, and it doesn't produce as much of a problem
downstream. We started doing a lot of numerical experiments on
the computer, and we noticed that higher density was better. And
what's the highest density around? Uranium, or something like
that, and there was lots of that stuff available. Now, it took a
number of years to reach that state. We went to ten foot long
reverse cones of steel and we used those for quite a time.
Carothers: Wasn't there a time when they were lead?
Dismukes: No, they have never been lead. We talked about
that, and we were a little nervous about lead. It has such a low heat
of melt we were worried about squirting a lot of lead up the pipe.
And, the density isn't that much higher than steel, so it wouldn't be
a big difference.
Somewhere along there, say 1975, we started experimenting
with really high density, on the computer. Uranium was much more
beneficial. The energy in the pipe wasn't sufficient to open the pipe
up. And when the ground shock pushed it back in it was relatively
cool.
Carothers: Let me see if I have the concept. The uranium is
sitting here. The material that starts coming from the zero room
heats it very rapidly and starts to push it out. You would like it to
just sit there until the ground shock gets there and starts to move
it in.
*0r^fy&*ilk #&..* :;.:••:••>-, •;
iy,. #
'V,
*5ft^-y/
December 12, 1963, Eagle event. Line of sight to the surface.

The white blur at the bottom of the tower is the emergence of the first flow from the pipe.
- j
y - " • . < .
% *«MfclL-\^^
v*JpHnHHl
1!
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Eagle event, a small fraction of a second after the previous picture.

Pipe Flow 473
Dismukes: Right. And, the stuff in the pipe that gets there
doesn't have a high Mach number. In other words, there's a lot of
thermal energy as well as kinetic energy. So, it creates at least many
tens of kilobars of pressure in there. That's enough to start trying
to make the pipe bigger; to push the pipe out before the ground
shock has really had time to get there. The ground shock at first tries
to stop it from moving out, and then it tries to push it back in. Of
course, the bigger the pipe has become, and the more energy there
is in it, the more work the ground shock does on it, and adds even
more energy which, potentially, can go up the pipe.
Now, that's one thing everybody always assumes is bad for
containment. It might not be. Letting all that energy go up the pipe
doesn't necessarily cause a problem, except it can sure attack other
things like the mechanical closures. In principle it could even get
to the experiment station and do damage to the experiments. But
if we've done our job there won't be device debris in it, and so it's
not radioactive. So, if we could let all this fast stuff go roaring up
the pipe and just got lost, and out of the way, maybe we could close
the pipe even better.
Carothers: You are recapitulating a line of thought that
occurred in Livermore following the event called Eagle. It was the
one that produced a fireball at the surface. We were a little
surprised to see that.
Dismukes: I'll bet.
Carothers: I had people who did things like fireball yields, and
I said, "How much energy was there?" They came up with a number
which was kind of off the wall, not applying fireball yield rules, of
course, but HE fireballs, you might say. They said, "About two
hundred pounds."
Dismukes: I would have guessed it might have been a few tons.
Either way, it's not really very much energy, but it looked spectacu-
lar. You wouldn't want to be standing there.
Carothers: No. It sure blew up the tower that had the
instruments on it. Anyway, "Bang." There was the fireball, and all
these pieces of the tower flying around. Then there was a quiescent
period. Not very long. Maybe a couple of seconds. Up to that
point there was no radioactivity.
Dismukes: That fireball wasn't radioactive? It was just some

hot gas?
Carothers: Yes. Following that, after this short period, there
was steam or smoke, and it was quite radioactive. And so, doing the
kind of deep thinking that we used to do in those days we said,
"Well, there wasn't any activity there in the beginning. Why don't
we just let that go by. Then, if we had some big valves, and if we
could close them in half a second, or a second, we could just shut
it off." That's where ball valves on the vertical line-of-sight pipe got
invented. Of course, we discovered they could be taken out one
way or another, but that's another story. But that's what you
reminded me of when you said, "Maybe it's good to let this go by;
it's not radioactive. Then we will close things off."
Dismukes: It's not guaranteed to be bad for containment per

se.
Carothers: No, but DNA has always had two problems. The
more severe one is to preserve the experiments, to protect the
samples. I think of the tower on Eagle when you say, "Let it go by."
As far as the problem of a release to the atmosphere goes, if you
folks succeed in protecting the experiments, containment is virtu-
ally assured.
Dismukes: That's almost axiomatic, you would think. But I
don't know if that is really true. And that's because we've had some
strange results where things looked good for awhile, and then later
they didn't.
Carothers: Anyway, you now have put a lot of high-Z, high-
density stuff around the pipe, and hopefully it stays relatively cool.
Dismukes: Right. And so we're really accomplishing two
things. We're keeping the pipe, which we have to close later, from
expanding. And we're also putting somewhat cooler, higher density
material into the pipe. The problem is that if you make this reverse
cone longer, you have to run the calculations longer in time to see
what happens after you get to the end of it, and we haven't explored
that region enough.
Carothers: Computers are getting faster.
Pipe Flow 475
Dismukes: Yes. But the modeling issues are significant. Where

we think the real problems are is later in time than where we're now
talking about. It's in the few milliseconds regime where no one is
really dealing with what appears to me to be the most likely source
of containment problems.
Carothers: What do you think that source is?
Dismukes: It's that we still have gas, a lot of hot gas, in the
pipe, which is trying to expand the pipe, and we have the ground
shock coming along. The interaction of those, and treating the flow
in the pipe, modeling it well, is difficult. We don't know how to do
that right now. That area is the one that looks to us like the biggest
problem -- the influence of the pipe flow on the ground shock and
the stemming plug formation.
We ran a calculation, one we know isn't a good calculation, out
to ten milliseconds on one of our standard designs, and things didn't
happen the way we expected. We were kind of shocked. We didn't
form a good plug after we got past the end of the reverse cone, or
extension. There was quite a long period where we had very little
material in the pipe. And then finally a plug started to form. We
knew that we weren't treating the physics very well, but that was
scary.
And some of our reentry observations are scary. We see
occasionally, "core flow." )oe hates the words, but that's what I
want to call it. That's where, when you mine back in, down the main
drift, you see a well defined stream of grout which you can identify
because it's a different color. And that grout came from relatively
close-in. How did it get through, if we're forming a plug? It clearly
couldn't have been moving, or I don't think it could have been
moving, as fast as the ground shock. If it wasn't, then why didn't
the ground shock cause the pipe to be closed ahead of it? That
stream didn't get through there afterwards, because it is a well
defined stream, and it wouldn't maintain that kind of definition.
That implies we had a low impedance path through what we would
like to think was a plug, and this stuff was being extruded through
it.
We've seen that more than once, and that's very frightening.
It suggests to us that this plug doesn't always have the integrity we
would like to think it does. The other disturbing thing relating to
the extensions is that, although we don't understand why it's
happening, there is some empirical evidence that we've had more

problems since we've used the long extensions than when we had the
short ones. You know, we had a sequence of events when we
decided we understood everything.
Carothers: That's right. There was a time when you might well
have thought that.
Dismukes: And those pipes had iron reverse cones which were
somewhat shorter. Then we got smart, and things appeared to really
work well for a while, but we've had a lot of problems since then.
Other things, many, many other things have changed, like pipe
taper. A number of people have studied this very hard, and there's
no finger to point at one thing and say, "That's what did it."
Carothers: I believe that. At the presentations to the Panel
there are often lots of viewgraphs which are designed to show that
the upcoming shot looks very much like previous ones. "Well, see,
here's a whole bunch of other shots, showing where the various
stemming grouts are and how long they are. And see, this one looks
very much like them, because the grout sections are pretty much the
same. And so, this one is good." And I sit there, and I think, "I'll
bet there's probably two hundred and seventeen other things that
are different, ranging from different manufacturers of the cables, to
a different method of mining, to a different tuff, to who knows
what."
Dismukes: Sure, and that's one thing I think we are really
fighting, and there's no way to beat it; you can never repeat a test.
The medium you're shooting in has to be different, either because
it has been shaken by another test, or just because the earth is not
homogeneous.
Carothers: How would you summarize the state of the thinking
today about the front-end, including the reverse cone?. Do people
feel fairly satisfied with it?
Dismukes: I always hesitate to answer those questions because
I feel it's very tempting to be self-serving and say they're wonderful,
and there's clearly no problem, because we designed them and we
think they work.
On the other hand, there are people who are concerned about
it. I'm somewhat concerned about the reverse cone, because of the
number of seeps we've had since we started using these longer,
Pipe Flow All
heavier ones. We had that long sequence of events with no apparent

problems, where we decided we clearly understood everything. I
don't think we did, and the one problem that I have with those shots
is that we missed a beautiful opportunity when we didn't reenter
them. We didn't look at them, so we don't know what they did in
close. So, we don't know what a good shot looks like, or we haven't
seen very many.
We're just amazed every time we do look because there's
always something different that we don't like to see. That's
somewhat disturbing, but clearly there wasn't a lot of radioactivity
seeping into the tunnel on those shots, that's for sure. You have to
be concerned that we've done something bad making the changes
that we have. The calculations say that we've reduced the pipe flow
significantly, and I think the measurements of pipe flow tend to
support that, at least qualitatively. As far as earlier time frames, in
the front-end, I feel that that's not a problem.
Carothers: That's something that, in principle, ought to be
calculable with codes you really believe, on time scales you under-
stand.
Dismukes: But you won't get a universal agreement on that.
As long as we keep doing the type of devices and yields that we have
been doing, we shouldn't have to worry about it. But if we suddenly
go to very low yields, where the energy is very limited, I'm not sure
we would know what to expect. We try to design these things to be
far from the edge of a phenomenological cliff. So, if the energy
changes a factor of two it doesn't really matter, and the system
doesn't respond in a non-linear way. We try to operate in what I
think is a fairly comfortable regime, where we can afford to be
wrong by quite a bit, and still have things basically work right.
If we start going to, for instance, very low yield devices, it's a
whole new ball game, because the containment, in the normal sense,
can't be achieved with the ground shock. Then the game is to make
sure you don't wreck one of the key elements further down the pipe
because the front-end didn't work right. There would be, maybe,
more threat of having to deal with jets of material out of the device
itself, and that's something we've only tried to deal with once, and
that was not a success. That was on the Hybla Fair event. We clearly
didn't design that one very well. Apparently the back of the test
chamber got blown out by what came up the pipe. For the kinds of
devices DNA is currently using I'm pretty comfortable.
Carothers: Really? How about the reverse cone?
Dismukes: Well, I'm a little nervous about that, because we've
seen some things that don't make me feel good. The Bermuda
Triangle of containment to me is the few meters beyond the reverse
cone, and maybe it includes the end of the reverse cone. That's the
time frame of a few milliseconds. Nobody's dealing with that
problem, for a lot of reasons - - partly for the reasons you already
reviewed. You have this little thin pipe in there, stretching over
many meters in length, and there don't seem to be enough zones,
even with the current fast computers, to really deal with that. Plus,
there's a combination of high shear flow in the pipe, where you have
very hot gases shearing against the pipe while it's blowing out. And,
you also need to treat the strength of the material fairly carefully,
because the shocks are getting down under a hundred kilobars. Plus
there are some weak shocks of a few kilobars out of the pipe. So,
you need to treat strength carefully. You need a Lagrangian code
for that, but a Lagrangian code can't handle the shear in the pipe.
We need a different approach, 1 think.
Peterson: Carl Keller thought for years that the most damaging
thing coming down to the closures was the pipe flow. He thought
that even to the extent that one might be able to remove some of
the closures if you could eliminate the pipe flow. Subsequently we
reduced the pipe flow a lot, and the reduction of pipe flow correlates
better with increasing bad experience than with anything else. I
don't understand why. It may be, for example, that the flow we
measure is not the damaging one. And so, we reduced the part we
can measure, but we may have increased the one which we can't
measure. It seems that for almost any technical detail you can bring
up there is evidence on both sides; there's contradictory evidence
as to which way you ought to go in changing it.
Carothers: Dan, when you talk about late-time calculations,
what is late time for you? When does it begin?
Patch: Late time for us was, and this goes back into the history
of before I joined the program, times beginning something like a
millisecond after the detonation, and in principle it goes on essen-
Pipe Flow 479
tially forever, until nobody is interested anymore. In actual

practice, late time calculationally has been from about a millisecond
to about a second. That's kind of the time span, because that's a
critical time range for containment.
Some of the things that we have done were empirical, to look
at data from a number of shots, and try to understand the time scale
they failed on and why they failed. Some of the things we did were
to look at fracture and fracture processes.
When I was at S-Cubed I was working very closely under the
wing of Jim Barthel. Jim was doing 1 1/2 D pipe flow calculations
with the FLIP code. So, I concentrated pretty much, for the three
years I was S-Cubed, on this energetic pipe-flow code, which was
subsequently used for Hybla Gold, and the nuclear shock tube
studies. Thatwasmy primary area of interest. In the last six months
to a year I had branched out, and was looking at ground motion from
the data base point of view. It was the old issue of HE-nuclear
equivalence. What could we determine from the data base that
exists for the number of HE shots that were done, and there were
quite a few HEshotsdonein the early seventies, versus what the data
base for the nuclear tests had?
Carothers: When you talk about ground motion, do you mean
close-in motion? You don't care about the surface motion, or
seismic signals, for instance, do you?
Patch: We really did not look at the surface or seismic motions
at all. We were much more interested in the stress range out to
about a kilobar, where the materials transition out of the plastic
regime. The strength is very important there; the materials are
plastic, but the strength modeling is important. In a way, the late-
time containment, almost, was the regime in which the motions
were strength dominated from a calculational point of view, at that
time.
Carothers: People talk about the energy release being so large
that it overwhelms the strength of the rocks, so the kind of rocks
don't matter, close in.
Patch: Our primary interest was when that wasn't true any
more. We were interested further out in time, further out in
distance. That statement is sort of true for some small time period,
and in some small regime. What we do is greatly simplify the details
of the zero room and the front-end. Then we start at zero time and
basically let it grow in a more or less spherical way. We may model
some shapes, but we don't do a detailed analysis of the hardware and
its effects on the ground shock. So, we start at zero time, and we
kind of sluff through the early part. Right now we're really trying
to fill the gap between the classic early-time calculations and the
late-time work we've done. We're trying to do a better job there.
What 1 would say is that what we would like to do is start the
calculations with the details of the zero room environment, with the
most important mechanical details, but probably not with the
sophisticated treatments that are done so well in trying to set the
timing of all the hardware.
Carothers: Do you also look at the material transport down the
pipe?
Patch: We have not done much with that. That's an area we
are just starting to work in. We have relied on S-Cubed to give us
a definition of that pipe environment. We've put that into the
calculations, as best we can do it, as a boundary condition.
Carothers: You look at the cavity growth, the shock that moves
out, and basically you try to tell people what the stemming is going
to do, and what the loads on the closure hardware are going to be?
Patch: Yes. We try not only to tell them what is going to
happen, but hopefully we're a little more proactive. We not only
look to see what the problems might be, but to say, "You really need
a smaller tunnel in this region, and you ought to take this out a little
farther," and so on. So, in a way we attempt to tune the geometry
of the test bed, depending on the medium properties and the
objectives of the test. The basic geometry of each test has, in some
sense, experimental constraints, such as the length of the pipe, the
taper angle, the yield limits, where it's fielded, and lots of other
things. At the lowest order we attempt to identify what are the
undesirable features of the test bed, and try to figure out how they
can best be mitigated. I think I would be overstating our role if we
said we were really fine-tuning the designs. We try to, but it's a very
complicated world out there. Calculators always have to guard
against the idea that they're doing something real, that they know
what they're doing, but we're doing the best that we can.
Pipe Flow 481
Carothers: What's the origin of the material that makes up the

pipe flow?
Patch: I think it comes from the pipe region just beyond the
reverse cone. The reverse cone keeps the pipe from expanding, and
I think that a real contributor to the flow is the fact that when the
ground shock comes along, the pipe is not what you think it is. It's
some new shape, which is a lot bigger. I think the reverse cone is
probably pretty effective in keeping that expansion from being as
bad as it would be without it. But the reverse cone is kind of tapering
down; it's quite a long distance in physical space, but it's probably
coming down a little too soon. We're still getting many kilobars of
stress off the end onto a bare pipe, which can't handle that. Of
course, that pipe is blowing up, so that stress actually may be applied
to the tuff in a way, because the pipe, I suspect, fractures. It can
only expand maybe five percent for mild steel, and then it's going
to begin to shatter. So, I think that region is the source of the really
serious part of the flow.
Carothers: This serious part of the flow; do you think it's pipe
material, or some of the grout, or both?
Patch: I think it's both. I suspect there's a fair amount of steam
that's generated from the very strong collapse forces. They're very
convergent, so that tends to act like a shaped charge. I think that
these collapse forces are generating very high pressures on a
relatively limited amount of material.
Carothers: Why don't you make the pipe square?
Patch: That question has been asked many times, and it's a
question that's never been satisfactorily answered. I personally
don't think it would make very much difference. We've fought this
battle back and forth, and I don't know that anybody has shed any
real light on how important the pipe being circular is. I've heard it
argued that because seemingly very similar shots have quite differ-
ent flow, therefore if we get just perfect convergence, for whatever
reason, we're in a much more serious regime than if things are
slightly off. And I've heard it argued the other way, that the flow
can't really be that sensitive to the shape, and there are other factors
that are causing these differences. I would really like to know the
answer.
Carothers: 1 remember on the CEP, for meeting after meeting

people would talk about jets down the pipe. Why were there jets?
Well, when you make a bazooka shell you try to make a jet, and the
way to make it is you make a nice cone of HE which you light at the
apex. So, you have a conical thing that slaps shut, and out comes
a jet. And so there was always the thought, "Why do you make the
pipes so symmetrical?"
Dismukes: It's certainly cheaper to do it that way, rather than
to make them oblong or oval. Not a lot though. There is one basic
argument why circular is better than the other cross sections. You
get the maximum exposure area from the device for the minimum
volume of open pipe. But I think that may be a second order effect.
In fact, the symmetry in the production of jets may be something
we should try to avoid, but we've always been very conservative,
maybe to a fault, in not wanting to try things we didn't think we
could calculate.
Carothers: Are the pipes and the closures symmetric because
that's what you can calculate, or did you build symmetrically
oriented codes because that's the way things were built?"
Dismukes: 1 believe that primarily it's the first thing you said.
We tend to build things we think we can calculate. But Carl Keller
did bring the helical insert into the system. Clearly we don't know
how to calculate that.
Carothers: And there have been things called mufflers.
Dismukes: And those did appear to have at least some
beneficial effects. I never understood how they worked, but they
sure did something. There's no question about that. We used them
for quite a while. They've sort of fallen out of favor though.
Carothers: The helix was put inside the pipe. One could put
it on the outside of the pipe.
Dismukes: Well, we've looked at that, a little bit. We were
convinced that you ought to be able to achieve some benefit by
asymmetrically loading the pipe from the outside. However, that
was never demonstrated. It's difficult to calculate, but we did try
to do some calculations. There were also some HE experiments
done to investigate the helix effect. They tried some cases of
loading the outside asymmetrically, and couldn't see that it did
Pipe Flow 483
anything, so that sort of fell out of favor. There has to be something

there, but we've never gotten serious about doing something about
it.
Keller: We did embark on quite an experimental series,
studying the formation and the attenuation of jets in the LOS pipes.
That really was an extension of that original debate about where the
energy in the pipe was coming from. I had decided that the jetting
process was ideal if you had a nice symmetric geometry. A n d , there
were all kinds of extra precautions taken in the design of things, like
shells, that were to produce jets. I thought, therefore, that there
was probably a way to discourage them. So, I had some calculations
done at S-Cubed, and some experiments done at Physics Interna-
tional, and people are still looking at those results.
We did a series of experiments in which we imploded pipes with
high explosives; just a cylinder surrounded by high explosives,
detonated at one end. It gave a jet out the end of that pipe that was
just awesome. With a two inch pipe, with about a half inch of
nitromethane on the outside, you could generate a jet that would
punch a two inch hole through six inches of solid aluminum. It was
really impressive. The PI people just couldn't believe it the first time
they tried it - - the damage they did to the target they put out there.
They put out a two inch target the first time, and the jet went
through it like soft butter. So, they put in a six inch target, and it
went through that. They were very impressed.
Well, we tried a helix on the outside, and it worked beautifully;
it just completely eliminated the jetting. There was just a speckling
on the front of the target. We took some flash x-rays of the pipes,
with and without the helix on the outside, and they showed that the
helix did perturb the implosion. So we thought, "No problem, we'll
just do that on the nuclear tests." We were trying to simulate with
this HE implosion of the pipe the ground shock implosion of the
pipe.
I don't know remember whether it was by E. T. Morris, from
Physics International, or Russ Duff, from S-Cubed, but the question
was raised; "Well, maybe the implosion from the ground shock is
different than that from HE." And that was certainly a possibility.
So we scaled down the HE shots to three-quarter inch tubes, drove
them with HE, and still got the target damage. Then we put in three-
quarter inch tubes radiating out from a three hundred pound
nitromethane charge in saturated sand, so we generated a ground
shock that imploded the pipes. We got awesome target damage.
Then E.T. Morris and I were sitting in the SRI cloakroom
waiting for a DNA meeting, and we were depicting the geometries
on ten pipes that we were going to put around the next nitrometh-
ane sphere. We tried changing the nature of the jet by lining the
pipe. One pipe we lined with paper, sort of carbon-like, one pipe
we lined with glass, one pipe we lined with polyethylene. And we
thought, "Well, that ought to really change the nature of the jet."
We were thinking we could perhaps modify the damage by modify-
ing the material that was in the jet.
We also used a very heavy walled pipe that was wrapped with
lead. It was a really heavy walled pipe because the calculations had
shown that a heavy walled pipe was more effective even than the
assymmetry. These were S-Cubed calculations, and that configura-
tion had shown the lowest jetting, in those calculations, for years.
I heard that heavy walled pipes were better long before I ever got
to DNA. But there was some worry about trying them on a shot,
because we thought that if we really changed the form of the energy
from a gas flowing down the pipe to a cannon ball, that the cannon
ball might do more damage to the doors than the gas flow. So, there
was some reluctance to try it. But since we were just doing these
HE experiments we could try it without any risk, so we put in a heavy
walled pipe.
We had one left and we were asking ourselves, "What shall we
try now? What's the variation?" We decided that maybe the plastic
lined pipe would show the biggest difference, and if we made that
with an asymmetric liner, it would even be better. And so our tenth
pipe had a plastic helix on the inside. The helix was only about
fourteen mils thick, and the pipe wall was about twelve mils thick.
So, it was like heavy scotch tape that we sealed to the pipe.
They fired the shot, and E.T. called me up and said, "You won't
believe the results." And he went through the pipes. We had a
couple of normal pipes on the shot, standard pipes with nothing in
them. They put big holes in the target. All the pipes with the liners
- - paper, plastic, and glass - - put bigger holes in the target. The
heavy walled pipe put the biggest hole in the target. The heavy wall
not only did not attenuate the jet, it made it the worst of all, directly
Pipe Flow 485
contrary to the lore. And the pipe with the plastic helix made no
crater at all. We couldn't believe that plastic helix made such a
difference. There was another pipe which had a lead helix on the
outside to simulate the assymmetry we had used with the HE so
successfully. It made a big hole in the target.
So, of all those things we tried, nothing worked except the
internal helix of plastic. We thought, "Well, maybe there was a
mistake in the experiment. Maybe a mouse crawled in that pipe and
just blocked it off, or something." We couldn't believe that helix
could be that effective. So we tried it again. This time we put in
a steel helixe, a lead helixe, a plastic helix, and we tried some of the
other pipes again. We had twenty pipes around the sphere this time.
We fired that, and sure enough, all the internal helixes were just
miraculous in their attenuation of the jet. At the time we didn't
know whether we were reducing the source, or whether we were
attenuating it. Eventually we learned that we were attenuating the
flow. The helix has no effect on the source.
We tried many things of that kind, and it was a fascinating
program, because we were studying all this parameter space experi-
mentally. Things that would take weeks to calculate, you could just
try. With twenty pipes we could try anything, and in a very short
time.
I told Don Eilers at Los Alamos about the results, and he was
really excited about them. He decided he'd try it on a nuclear test,
so he put in a pipe with an internal helix, and one without on the
Flora event, in 1980. He instrumented them to measure the
penetrations of steel plates at the end of the pipes. And he found
that he got a major reduction in the number of plates penetrated
with the internal helix. Los Alamos has used it ever since, and so
has Livermore, to reduce the flow of energy in the some of the
longer diagnostic pipes.
Bass: I think the best thing we could do to help ourselves would

be to put the helix back in the pipe.
Carothers: Why was it taken out?
Bass: Every event that has had a helix has seeped more than
Joe (LaComb) wants. Now why? Why does he say it leaks? Because
you are dissipating energy quite close in, into the stemming, more
than you were without the helix. You're also getting in the
stemming where gas can go around your facility. That's the only
leak that you're liable to see through geologic features, is Joe's
point. As far as I'm concerned, all the DNA work I've done, or have
been connected with where there was a leak, has leaked in the line-
of-sight pipe. Except, where the leaks came from a region where
there was a helix. There have been little leaks there. Otherwise, it
has come right down the tunnel. I don't think we have ever, or at
least very rarely, leaked through the formation. I think we leak
through man-made facilities.
Carothers: How about the the experiments Carl Keller de-
scribed which he had done to look at pipe flow? These were the HE
experiments with a dozen pipes with a helix of this kind and that kind
in them, and they were ail on the same shot.
Bass: The trouble is, the helix on those HE shots is not the helix
on a nuclear event. The helix works in an entirely different manner
in a nuclear event than it does with HE. Carl said the helix worked
late. In fact, it works early. If the helix works, the pressure outward
on the pipe has to be increased. What we find on events where we
had a helix, the pressure at 50 meters, which on DNA events is
where there is a muffler section, the pressure out of the pipe is down
by an order of magnitude if there is a helix. That says any reduction
has to have occurred earlier. Either that or we don't have any idea
how a helix works. Maybe we don't know how a helix works.
We do know that on one event the pressures went up inside the
muffler section when a helix was used, and that had never happened
before. That says we added disorder to the flow. We had pressures
higher coming out of the muffler than we had going into the muffler,
and we had pressure measurements inside the muffler which were
high as you go through the muffler, higher than when you went into
the muffler. This is very unusual, and it only happened one time.
That one time we had a helix up close to the front. So, we added
disorder to the flow. Where we didn't have the helix, the muffler
didn't seem to do much. Where we had the helix the muffler did
one hell of a lot. Which says to me we had all kinds of things going
on. This has been discounted completely, and nobody has paid any
attention to it.
Pipe Flow 487
Peterson: At about the time that Pac Tech split off from S-
Cubed Norton Rimer and and myself started working on what we
termed the late-time containment issues. Those are the cavity
growth, the cavity conditions, leaks to the tunnel complexes, the
ground motion, the thermodynamic and fluid flow process - the
very slow processes that you see.
Carothers: When you say the late-time, where do you pick that
up?
Peterson: 1 suppose about ten milliseconds. All of these times
are relative, but compared to the times of the explosion they are
slow.
Carothers: I read somewhere once, and I think about it
occasionally when I think about time scales for containment, that if
you wanted to build an accurate scale model of the solar system, you
would have to make it not much smaller than the system is. There
are very large distances, and if you try to scale them to a reasonable
size, then some of the smaller things, like much of the asteroid belt,
vanish. They get so little you can't see them.
In a similar way, when you think about the time scale of
containment processes, which goes from small fractions of a micro-
second out to perhaps a few hours, how can you possibly scale this
to where everything fits? It's got to be in chunks, in a way.
Peterson: That is correct, and of course, that is one of the real
difficulties in looking at it, because we do, being people, tend to
split things into problems we can digest. But when we do that, we
lose the coupling effects between them, which can be very impor-
tant. You arbitrarily split on what you think you can understand,
and that has nothing to do with what might be the most important.
So, if you look at the way we evaluate containment, we do have it
split into the time scales of various effects. We will look at cavity
growth, we will look at ground motion, we will look at pipe flow, we
will look at leakage, and things like that, but they're all very, very
coupled. And one of the things I think we've fallen short on is to
look at the coupling effects between these things. In other words,
pipe flow is coupled very closely to ground motion and cavity
growth.
Duff: The early efforts recognized that the problem of flow in

the line-of-sight pipe, plasma flow, is a very complex problem and
very hard to calculate. It's complex because the hydrodynamics
that we are dealing with is obscure. We don't really know the source
of this axisymmetric jet. We don't know whether it is a jet of
material which has been strongly irradiated, vaporized, modified,
melted, whatever, and then subsequently is closed off under ground
shock. We don't know the detailed nature of that closure. Is it truly
an axisymmetric thing, or just due to the nature of the non-
uniformities in the real world is it something less? I'm sure those
non-uniformities influence the initial conditions. Nevertheless, we
made an effort from day one to try to develop a numerical capability
to allow us to calculate the flow of the material in the pipe, and the
interaction of that flow with the pipe wall. That involves ablation,
material entrainment, and all of the processes that get involved. It
is a complex problem, and I'm not sure we ever did it very well.
We were also acutely aware of the aspect ratio of the problem
we were dealing with. A line-of-sight pipe is a thousand feet long;
it starts a few inches in diameter, and ends up a few feet in diameter,
order of magnitude. If you look at the numerical zoning require-
ments for such a geometry, it is a horrendous problem.
Carothers: Well, the zones just have to be little at one end and
big on the other.
Duff: Sure. And things don't work well. The codes don't work
well if the aspect ratio is more than about three to one. This was
in the early seventies; we had no Crays. We were working on a link
to a Univac machine that existed somewhere else. Because of the
aspect ratio problem we developed what was known as the UNION
code that tried to couple three calculations. One was a flow of the
plasma, created as well as we could do it. It was inside a cylindrical
envelope which was a 2-D calculation of the stemming motion as a
result of the ground shock as it propagated out. This was buried
inside a 1-D code. The UNION code was to put boundary
conditions between these various things. That was coming along.
]erry Kent was my assistant in those very early days, and I had
passed the contract over to him to run. Bjork was one of the major
project physicists. These guys became aware of what we now talk
Pipe Flow 489
of as residual stress, and they used that awareness as the basis of a

pitch to DNA to fund a separate company. DNA went along, and
Pacifica Technology -- Pac Tech -- was formed.
Now, the point of this is not to bemoan the fact that part of my
staff took off and formed their own company. The main difficulty
from my point of view, and I think from the containment point of
view, was that the intellectual enterprise of treating the phenom-
enology from a millisecond to infinity was broken right in the
middle. A new interface was installed. We had the job of trying to
define the initial conditions. That was Dismukes, who was doing
some aspects of the very early time steps. Then Pac Tech had the
responsibility to do ground shock calculations, not only in a one-
dimensional sense, but in the sense of studying the LOS collapse, the
jetting phenomena, and all that may be happening in the pipe. And
then we were supposed to worry about what happens after that.
Well, interfaces are awkward. They are awkward in the best of
circumstances. They are particularly awkward in a competitive
environment.
Rimer: The pipe flow aspects have always tended to be called
late-time. They're motions that Mike Higginbotham computes for
Chuck, and that we put in our pipe flow code, or at least we used
to do that. Jim Barthel used to do that work. All that information,
like the pipe flow, goes down to Pac Tech for the stemming motion
calculations. Meanwhile, we are looking at free-field ground
motion, model development, and then the later time aspects, like
hydrofracture, porous flow, creep.
Carothers: Do you generate the input for the codes that Pac
Tech uses for the stemming motion calculations?
Rimer: Yes, except the pipe flow has not proved to be very
important. You can either include it or not, and you get the same
stemming ground motion, for whatever reason. Now, what neither
of us model is how that pipe flow affects the properties of the grout.
The pipe expands, blows up, and none of us have attempted to
model, because we don't know how to model, what that does to that
grout material
There's a lot of overlap between Pac Tech and us. They do a
lot of just traditional, straightforward calculations of each event. At
the same time, I'm calculating ground motions. Here I'm talking
about the underground free-field motions around the tunnel, and in

the tuff away from the tunnel. What are the proper models for the
behavior of the rock? What causes the rebound? What causes the
residual stress development? Why does the rock hydrofracture or
not hydrofracture? How do we develop models to match ground
motion data? I'm the guy who's supposed to develop the new stuff,
do the innovations in ground motion modeling, etcetera.
Carothers: Byron, after Mighty Oak DNA made a number of
changes in the design of tunnel test beds. The last few DNA events
seemed to perform well. What changes were made?
Ristvet: Well, first off, the devices are lower yield, and so the
driving forces on the stemming column are a lot less. And we've
moved our closures out in scaled range a lot further, so the
stemming anchor does not get challenged. Those came about after
Mighty Oak, when we took a total relook at Middle Note, which was
in 1987. That was the first of the low yield type of design that now
has become our standard. We found out how to modify the
radiation environment so we could use one source to provide all the
various kinds of radiation environments. That's done with shims
and filters.
Again, things sometimes appear in the containment world to be
cyclic. Compare the following discussion with Byron Ristvet with
the words of Billy Hudson and Carl Keller at the beginning of this
Chapter.
Carothers: I could translate what you've said to mean that the
basic cause of at least some of the problems was that the closures
were too close.
Ristvet: Basically that's correct, and that happened in a couple
of ways. We wanted to get to a standardized design. The reason for
that was so we only ordered a standard section one and section two
of the pipe, which are the sections from the working point all the
way out to the end of stemming. If we could standardize that we
would save a couple of million bucks every time we went out and
bought pipe. Of course, that was for the old higher yield shots.
Well, everybody wanted everything possible. Number one,
they wanted a large aperture so they could vary the exposure area
if it was needed, dependingon the source. We didn't use one source
in those days, we used different ones on different shots, and some
Pipe Flow 491
had larger areas to look at compared to other sources. Apertures

could vary anywhere up to seven or eight inches. In order to
accommodate a seven or eight inch aperture you have to have a
pretty good size bore.
Then we got the idea we could save a lot of real estate and
money if we made the pipe shorter. So, the way we do that to get
the same exposure area at a shorter range is to increase the beam
taper, which increases the pipe taper. And so now we had increased
our cross sectional area of the pipe, especially up in the front-end
region, significantly. In closure technology in those days we were
still using the sliding gates, the Modified Auxilliary Closure, or
MAC. Because of the metals involved you can't make those any
bigger than about six feet in diameter, and get them to close fast
enough. Six feet is about as big as you can get an aluminum billet
that's forged, and that has the strength that you would like.
So now we had to move things in significantly closer. Then we
had them at a range where the grout stagnation pressures were far
exceeding the door strengths. In addition, in the process of trying
to perhaps eliminate pipe flow, we were actually making pipe flow
worse. On both Misty Rain and Mighty Oak we had reverted back
to using iron extensions rather than using the high density tungsten
or uranium extensions. One of the reasons we did that is that Carl
Keller had felt we were getting a fair amount of yield out of the
uranium from the fast neutrons getting up the pipe. To me that
never explained why we saw plutonium against the MAC, and even
down further on Huron Landing.
Carothers: That's the way you make plutonium -- neutrons and
U238.
Ristvet: Well, I know you can make it that way in a reactor, but
it wasn't that kind of plutonium. There were some concerns about
that, so Carl went back to the iron extensions. And of course, on
Misty Rain the pipe flow jumped up again, and it shot the doors out
with the pipe flow - - at least the first one, and probably the second
one too from the evidence out in the test chamber. We had sort of
a coating of iron, with a coating of aluminum, followed by a coating
of grout, on every surface that faced the working point. Not only
that, there was pretty good cratering back on the bulkheads and
other things, because block motion prevented the TAPS from
coming down. That is about as far out as we've ever seen significant
block motion, which is rather interesting. Anyway, it was not pipe

taper alone, I don't think. It was not bore size. It was the fact that
all of those things came together, and we brought those closures in
so close that they were no longer effective stemming anchors.
We did a vertical shot called Huron King, and I and Jim Barthel,
of S-Cubed, looked at all the old history. It became rather obvious
that the HE machines in those days, because they were in so close,
became shrapnel against the rest of the closures. That's why we
moved our HE machine out to a similar stress range as we use for
the FAC today. It was in part that experience that led us to put the
FAC where we do. I really think we could go back to those larger
pipe tapers, maybe 0.24 inches per foot, 24 inches per hundred
feet, and be okay, if we were in a normal zealotized tuff.
If we have the FAC out at roughly a kilobar, because we know
it can withstand two or two and a half kilobars so we've got a good
factor of two safety, we have confidence in the ability of it to act as
a stemming anchor, and not let the stemming go down the LOS pipe.
I think my greatest concern in our current low yield design is the
failure of the FAC to fire. Even though ground shock will close it,
I don't know how much grout will have been shoved through it at
that time, and whether the cavity pressure will be sufficiently far
down so the stemming won't continue to hydrofrac and erode as it
did on Mighty Oak.
Peterson: There have been a number of observations on some
events that haven't performed just as we'd like that I find very
interesting. You can talk about pipe taper, and sort of the bad
performance. Or the performance wasn't as good once we went to
the bigger pipe taper. That's true. We also went to a longer
extension, and the performance wasn't as good after we went to the
longer extension. Some of the shots worked all right, but they didn't
all work really good.
People say, for example, that on Misty Rain and Mighty Oak,
because we went to a bigger pipe taper we moved our first closures
in much nearer the working point. If you really look at that, it isn't
much nearer. It's really a very small distance, and the change in the
dimensions don't even compare to changes that were made in some
previous events.
Pipe Flow 493
I believe it was Dido Queen where, from a scaled view, we were

in much, much closer, and it worked fine. We went to Diablo Hawk,
where the first containment structure was much further out. The
containment was okay, but the door got penetrated by the grout
flow. Various people pick various different things to explain these
things. People have also picked on material properties; there wasn't
quite enough air void, or it was a little bit more saturated, and all
that.
I guess the one point I would like to make is that if you go back
and look at all of these things, and really compare all the previous
experience, you can always find one, two, or three shots that
worked fine given any of these things. And so, I know I don't
understand it, and it's confusing. It makes you go over to what DN A
is using now, which is a really strong stemming bulkhead. Given the
fact that we don't seem to know very well what happens, or why it
happens, maybe we should build something that should stop any-
thing in the tunnel.
Carothers: It's another overburden plug, in concept. It's to
hold whatever can get there.
Peterson: Yes. It should hold the most extreme conditions that
we've measured so far. It might not be fancy, but one would hope
it would work. I think when we want to get fancy we should
understand all the things we know, and have seen. When that will
happen, I don't know.
When the concept of the "residual stress" came up, people
calculated it and could say, " O h , I can see now why the gas stays in
the cavity." One of the things that bothered Carl Keller was that
now we understood the residual stress field, and the containment
cage, we didn't want a hole to go through it.
That seems reasonable, but one of the things that has always
puzzled me is that one of the first designs, on Dining Car in 1 9 7 5 ,
seemed to work fine. There was a pipe with a certain taper, and the
closures were at a certain place. They had rock-matching grout out
to a certain distance, and a superlean grout out further, and that
shot worked. Now, the peak of the residual stress field on Dining
Car was in the area in the tunnel where there was superlean grout,
which is very weak. The rock-matching grout stopped inside of that.
At Pac Tech they started looking at these stemming plug

formation concepts in more detail, They did a number of calcula-
tions, and it appeared that if you made the rock-matching grout
column longer, and the superlean grout column shorter, you would
set up a better residual stress field across the tunnel.
There is nothing wrong with that concept whatsoever, but that
was the time when we started to go with longer reverse cones to
lower pipe flow, and made a few other changes. We also started
seeing these slight bits of gas seeping into the tunnel complex. Well,
who knows? So, the Mighty Oak design went back to Dining Car.
It had a rock-matching grout length back to what it was on Dining
Car, and a superlean grout length back to Dining Car too. Well,
obviously that wasn't the answer.
495
19
Codes and Calculations
The development of computer codes for the calculation of

underground effects resulting from the detonation of a nuclear
device began concurrently with the first underground events. Bob
Brownlee has described his work on the Bernillilo event, fired in
1958. At Livermore there was the Rainier tunnel event in 1957,
where the principal objective was to contain the device debris, and
the tunnel events for device development in Hardtack II in 1958.
Logan, also in 1958, was the first tunnel experiment to use a line-of-
sight pipe for effects experiments, and it contained well despite the
almost complete lack of knowledge about how the detonation would,
or could be contained.
The Plowshare program, which envisaged various civilian
applications of underground explosions in a variety of earth mate-
rials, needed the capability to predict many of the phenomena that
today are considered important to the containment world, princi-
pally those associated with the response of the earth to the energy
release of the device. The device development events, fired in
emplacement holes had considerably simpler calculational require-
ments. The appropriate depth of burial for the yield was really all
that was thought to be necessary, and for that empirical rules
seemed to suffice.
Higgins: By Hardtack Gene Pelsor's calculations had advanced,
and John Nuckolls had developed a code called UNEC — the
Underground Nuclear Explosion Code. It was later renamed SOC
when John went to one of the device design groups. It was a simple
one dimensional plastic-elastic code with a Von Meses solid equa-
tion of state, which doesn't allow much fracturing. But, it did do
a very nice job, with the right adjustable coefficients, of reproducing
what was going on in the Tunnel Bed tuffs. So, from shot to shot
we could use that, and see that the Shockwave pressure was
generating a seal in the tunnel. What was wrong with it was, the
equation of state of the material in the real world is not a Von Meses
solid. It's brittle.
Carothers: Or, maybe you could say that it is a pile of rocks.

Higgins: It's a pile of rocks with cracks and holes. So, the
rebound, that part which is really the important part of the
calculation of containment, wasn't calculated. But the tunnel
closing, and the pipes closing; all that was calculated very well. Our
misunderstanding of containment was that we thought once the
material was at a density of three, it was going to stay a density of
three, and therefore we didn't have to worry about it any more. End
of problem.
And that really was the end of the problem, in a way, because
we could calculate out to maybe a 100 microseconds, if we really
devoted everything we had to it. And that was only in one
dimension. Peak pressures were calculated quite well, but that's
about all. Rise times and decay curves were not calculated at all.
Rambo: I think some of the very first calculations at Livermore
that had to do with containment were calculations done for the
Benham event. Benham was a high yield shot with some kind of a
satellite hole that was of concern. That was probably one of the very
first sets of containment calculations.
Carothers: That's rather late in time if you consider that the
Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. Benham was in
December of 1968.
Rambo: That's right, but we didn't have the material proper-
ties to do that kind of work, and they didn't do any logging. The
only times they would do special cases of logging was on Plowshare
related events. On those shots they would go in and do the best job
they could to log the hole, even though the technology wasn't really
very good.
The K Division people, the Plowshare group, were starting to
do calculations. They had a code which was called SOC, which was
a 1-D code, that they had started with. Seymore Sack and George
Maenchen did some of the TENSOR work that was done. Then
there was a kind of a split there. K Division took up some of those
codes, and put strength models in them. Ted Cherry was the one
who did most of the strength models. He did TENSOR and I'm sure
he did some of the work that went into SOC.
Codes and Calculations 497
Carothers: The original impetus for doing calculations on

underground shots came from the Plowshare cratering program, but
the names you mentioned are those of device designers.
Rambo: Yes, those device designers did the original SOC code,
for the Plowshare people.
Carothers: SOC is a 1 -D code, so that means you spherize the
world around the bomb. What's a code like that good for? The
world is not one dimensional.
Rambo: No, it's not one dimensional, but in the early days we
didn't have a 2-D code available. So, by default we took the 1-D
code and said, "Well, it seems to predict ground motion reasonably
well, at least for the outgoing peaks, before the reflections take
place." We never did any SOC calculations, or darn few, that
related to containment until after Baneberry. There were calcula-
tions done for Plowshare. Then the 2-D calculations came along,
and they were put together for the cratering shots. They were much
better.
Ted Cherry, in the early days, would try to match field data
with SOC. There was a lot of battling going on as to what was really
in the code, and how much truth there was to the SOC code. It was
under a lot of stress. People were not confident of what was
happening. There were problems with matching the data, but that's
what you have to do in these calculations. You take a first try at it,
and then after the fact, you see what you can learn from it. What
you learn from looking at the real data is what there is about your
model that is wrong, or maybe you find out that the code was just
plain wrong. It was a good feedback loop. When we did fail, we
learned more than when we didn't fail, but we still had a lot of
mysteries that we were not able to solve.
Calculations played a different part, in those earlier times at
Livermore. People like Bob Terhune would walk over to our people
and say, "Look, you can't shoot this. Our calculations indicate this,
that, and the other thing." It might have been some private theory
of his own. There were a couple of places we avoided because of
that, and went to other sites. We wouldn't do that today.
Scolman: I am not aware, but I'm not sure I would have been
aware, of us ever, ever deciding that a hole was not suitable for an
event in the days before Baneberry, other than one time. Carl
Keller, who was in the containment business for Los Alamos in those
days, became concerned over an event in Area 4. I don't remember
the name, but it was a reasonably high yield shot which was to be
fired fairly close to the basement rocks, to the dolomite. Carl was
convinced that we would generate enough C02 that it could not be
contained in the overlying rock. And he heckled us sufficiently that
we finally moved the event to another location.
App: In 1971 Bob Brownlee hired me, Tom Cook, and Tom
Bennion to start up the calculational effort for containment. We
weren't interested in developing our own codes, not at all. We
wanted to get something that somebody else had, and if we had to
convert it for our use, fine. Tom Cook and I drew straws to see who
would concentrate on which codes. We went by Labs, and Tom got
Livermore. Tom got the 1-D SOC code from Livermore, and the
2-D TENSOR code as well. I got the WONDY and TOODY codes
from Sandia.
We evaluated and benchmarked the four codes, to determine
which would be the most appropriate for us. We chose Livermore's
SOC, and Sandia's TOODY. We also used WONDY to a limited
extent. Things evolved from there. SOC went by the wayside after
a number of years because, although it had a lot of containment lore
behind it, and was an excellent code, it was written in a language
called LRLTRAN. When the Cray machines arrived, LRLTRAN was
not implemented, so SOC no longer worked. Actually, Charles
Snell, who now works here at Los Alamos, but who did work at
Livermore, has it running again, on our machines. He liked it, and
he converted it from LRLTRAN into standard FORTRAN.
The TOODY code has actually been our mainstay. It's what
I've primarily used for modeling purposes, with a lot of modifica-
tions to fit our particular needs. It's now more of a special purpose
code for ground shock modeling than it was at Sandia. We're in the
process of benchmarking other, newer codes against it, but I haven't
found any that are a substantial improvement. It has archaic coding.
It has twenty year old architecture, based on the CDC 6600 system.
It's hard sometimes to part with old friends. I know the innards of
it; another reason for not wanting to part with it.
Carothers: Billy, when you entered the containment business

in 1968 Livermore was no longer doing tunnel events, but vertical
line-of-sight shots were being done from time to time. Were there
any people in the Laboratory doing theoretical or calculational work
on containment related problems? Things such as flow in the pipes,
or ground shock closure of the pipes?
Hudson: 1 wasn't aware of any pipe closure calculations. I
think they were starting to do them, but 1 have the feeling that was
really in its infancy. There had been a very little bit done in terms
of using the same codes that are used to design bombs to predict
how a pipe would behave and close. All that started at very nearly
the same time as the containment group was formed. We started
then a program of code development for pipe behavior, in concert
with the folks at S-Cubed, and also in concert with some folks from
Los Alamos. For several years there was a fair amount of effort
expended on code development, and in trying to describe how pipes
really close.
Olsen: The codes that were available in the beginning were not
very good for that type of thing. They were basically derived from
the device codes. The early containment calculations were essen-
tially all on front-end things, and at that time the device codes were
used for that. We didn't really have anything beyond that, except
for some engineering codes that looked at loadings on pipes, and
how hard will you hit a valve assembly and will it hold up to 40 g's
of acceleration, and that kind of thing. We did a lot by the seat of
our pants.
There wasn't really any way to cacuiate pipe flow. We pretty
much had to go in and make measurements to see what regime we
were looking at. We tried to do some calculations on pipe flow, but
in my opinion there never was any really usable code for that. The
closest was a code called PUFFL. If you diddled enough of the many
parameters in it you could get it to match things, but as a predictive
capability it was pretty close to useless. It was sort of one step better
than back of the envelope calculations. For example, if you knew
what the burst strength of a pipe was, you could sort of say that if
you put that pressure in the bottom of the pipe section, and the pipe
opens up, you couldn't transmit more than that to the top of the
pipe, because the pipe would open up and dump the flow into the
medium. That's the kind of arguments we used.
We would do things like put accelerometers on valve housings

to find out what kind of input the valve was seeing, and how it
responded. We measured things like that, because we didn't have
much in the way of a design or predictive capability for the dynamic
environments, especially where there were multiple loadings on
different time scales. For instance, on a valve there's a shock
running up the steel pipe at one velocity, then ground shock, with
a different wave shape, at a slower velocity. And somewhere in
there is a loading from flow in the pipe hitting the closures. So,
there is this multiple loading on things, and we didn't have any first
principles way of attacking that. We did it empirically, which is why
there was the emphasis on diagnostics in the early days.
Keller: On Monero and some other events, Io and behold, the
radiation monitors in the holes showed the gas was going by the coal-
tar plugs. This absolute seal in the casing was not there. And the
pressures that were measured that were driving gas by those coal tar
plugs were modest; forty-five psi or so. It was at that time that it
was clear we needed a code to evaluate gas flow, because gas flow
is a big deal in stemming, and in containment in general.
And so AI Davis wrote a 1-D gas flow code based on Darcy's
equations. In a period of a couple of months we had that 1 -D gas
flow code. I said to AI, "But we need to evaluate uncased holes, so
we need a 2-D code." He said, "Oh, it will take a year to write a
2-D gas-flow code." And I said, "Come on, AI. I just saw what you
did for 1-D. We can do it in a month." He said, "Never. Never."
So I wrote the equations, and gave them to John Stewart. John
Stewart programmed them, I put in all the input-output statements,
corrected the errors in the original program, and John debugged it.
In one month we had an operating 2-D gas flow code. It was called
JACTS, John and Carls TDC.
With that we were able to evaluate the differences between the
cased holes and uncased holes. I took the Monero results, where we
had like five pressure measurements in the cased hole, with the top
two above the coal-tar plugs. And I took the driving conditions at
the bottom as the boundary condition, and calculated a 1 -D gas flow
up the hole. From that I deduced the kind of permeability you had
to have in the plugs in order to to get those volumes and pressures
of gas above them.
Then I hypothesized that the casing was perforated. To do that

I just removed some of the no-flow boundaries on that casing and
let the gas flow out into the medium. And with that I proved to
everyone's satisfaction that the amount of gas that you actually
released out of this uncased hole was trivial, and yet there was an
enormous drop in the gas pressure that was driving against the
stemming column. So, there wasn't a containment argument any
more about why uncased holes weren't appropriate, and Los
Alamos folded on the issue of uncased holes. Another concern was
that the holes wouldn't be stable enough, and would fall in during
the device emplacement, but Livermore had already proven that
that wasn't a big concern at all.
Carothers: The code you wrote must have been for noncon-
densable gases.
Keller: Right. The JACTS code is for noncondensable flow,
and you can still use it for lots of things, but the next thing that was
clearly needed was a steam-flow code. You need to treat the cavity
gas with a condensable-flow code because the cavity gas was thought
to be mainly steam, and that's not the same as the noncondensable
gas that the codes calculated. There were all these arguments in the
TEP about what the ramifications were of the condensable nature of
steam.
It took me a year to write the KRAK code. I had never written
a computer code before in my life, and the KRAK code took three
thousand cards or so. It was a monster compared to the JACTS
code. So, I had to begin to be really organized in my programming.
And, I had to learn all the thermodynamics of steam, because KRAK
included a full flow of condensation of steam in two dimensions. It
did not assume local thermodynamic equilibrium. It treated the
difference between the fluid temperature and the rock temperature,
and the heat exchange between them. It was an explicit finite
difference code, so it was easy to add to or change.
When I finally got it written I did a calculation which showed
that condensable flow from the cavity to the walls got nowhere.
Steam did flow into the wall, and it actually got in quite a ways, very
quickly. Then it condensed and clogged up the pore space with the
condensate. That throttled subsequent flow, and from there it just
crept along as it pushed this slug of water on ahead. And that slug
got longer and longer as condensation continued. So, condensable

porous flow from a cavity was not a containment concern. It wasn't
even a concern in the stemming, generally speaking.
KRAK was slow, because it was very detailed. The idea was
that while it would be so detailed that it would be too slow to ever
be very useful, you would teach yourself with the code what
approximations were appropriate, and then you could relax to a
more useful speed in a simplified version. It still runs, with the same
full-blown modeling, I guess.
Carothers: Well, the machines get faster.
Keller: Yes, the machines got faster, but it was still slow. It was
dreadfully slow. Brian Travis took it over after I left the Lab. He
worked for me one summer, the last summer I was at Los Alamos,
and so finally a professional programmer got his hands on it, and he
speeded it up a lot. He also gave me the idea of using an implicit
solution for the crack flow. AI Davis was sort of the chief physicist
consultant on the KRAK code, and AI's attitude generally was,
"Well, it's going to be real hard to do that." Mine was, "Come on,
AI. Let's do it. Tell me what the physics is and we'll do it." So,
we got along very well. AI kept me correct with the physics, and
I got him to hurry.
The next thing that was obviously needed then was a calcula-
tion of the greater threat, and that was that threat which had been
witnessed in Bandicoot, Pike, and Baneberry, where a fissure
propagated from the cavity to the surface. In other words, a
hydraulic fracture. So I added the hydrofrac option to the KRAK
code, and it's still being used.
Kunkle: When I showed up here in April of 1980, to begin
work at Los Alamos, my security clearance was still not through
being issued, but it was only a month before it was. I started work
down at the G Division headquarters in White Rock, working on the
KRAK code, which is a multi-phase, multimedia, steam-driven
hydrofracture code. AI Davis and Brian Travis were working on
KRAK at that time. Carl Keller had initiated this code back in 1974,
with a code called ]ACTS, but he had left to go to DNA field
command, to lead their containment effort.
We were trying to develop that code into an actual working

code. At the time I first started it would simply not run calculations.
Integrals would not converge, derivatives would blowup; there were
the normal programming type of problems. I spent most of the
summer of 1980 working with Brian Travis, running problems just
to get an answer. We were trying to develop the physics involved
in the KRAK code so we could get answers we thought might be
right.
How codes and calculations are used today varies from organi-
zation to organization. And, the importance of the results of the
calculations varies as well. The Livermore and Los Alamos events
in stemmed emplacement holes seem to require little more than
empirical rules to select a depth of burial. The DNA tunnel events
involve the interaction of many of the phenomena produced by the
detonation, and extensive calculations are done on how the experi-
mental hardware, including the line-of-sight pipe, will be affected.
The results of the caculations done often cause changes in a particu-
lar design.
App: We normally don't run calculations for every event,
although that's really not a bad idea just to keep in practice, or to
see if certain things pop up that are unrealistic in the calculation, or
that might be suggestive of a problem we didn't anticipate. But
normally we do not work in that mode. Usually it's a specific
problem. For example, Dahlhart. We had a nearby pipe, a fish, that
was stuck in a nearby exploratory hole. We didn't really know the
condition of the pipe, and we were having a difficult time finding out
what the condition was. The worry was that it was open, and passing
through the region we regard as the residual stress field it could
provide a path for cavity gas to get high into the geologic section.
We performed some normal ground shock calculations, and used the
shock levels to determine whether or not the pipe would be closed
off, and how far it would be displaced.
That's an example of how we used the code on a specific event.
We don't use calculations for absolute predictions — in fact, I don't
even like that word in association with calculations. I prefer to use
them as an analysis tool, as part of the overall analysis.
Carothers: If the containment scientist says, "I want these

calculations run for this event," how would that be done at Los
Alamos?
House: As Fred said, typically we don't do calculations on the
events. There's no burning need for them unless we have some
peculiar geometry in terms of emplacement. Or, a situation where
we might want to look at the effect of the structural situation, such
as a fault, or scarps, and so forth and so on. The containment
scientist will, if necessary, call for calculational work to be done on
whatever particular aspect he or she deems necessary. That's
usually done hand in glove with the phenomenologist.
So, we do not do calculations routinely. We have a situation
that's a little different from Livermore's. I believe that Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory's ]ohn Rambo is the designated, and dedi-
cated containment calculation guy. I remember John telling me
once, "Well, I take a look at everything." And if he thinks
something needs to be done, he may contact the containment
scientist, or vice versa. In our Laboratory we don't have either a
designated, or dedicated person. We have people who are sup-
ported by the containment program in the calculational venue, and
who are required to be responsive to needs, but they are on a call-
out basis. In some cases the phenomenologist will do the calculational
work if it's in that person's particular area of expertise. Tom
Kunkle, for instance, runs our KRAK code. Wendee Brunish runs
a code called TOODY.
Rambo: Today, calculations are kind of nice to use to get
things through the CEP, but nobody wants to look at the negative
side of them. Nobody wants to say, "Look, we're going to have to
move the site," or do this, that, or the other because we have a
calculation that doesn't look quite right. Fred App, from Los
Alamos, says, "Well, we never use calculations any more to decide
about a shot. If it's negative we don't say we're going to make any
big changes."
Sometimes I see problems in the calculations that I don't
necessarily bring up, because the system has sort of bypassed them
at this point. Calculations don't mean much today. The containment
scientist can elect or not elect to look at calculations, if he so desires.
He can say, "I don't need any calculations. I think past experience
is fine." And so even though I may have a different idea on that,
it doesn't matter, and it can stop right there. So, I see the potential
for going past a bad one - - one that may show an indicator, a blip,
in a calculation as a potential problem. That never even gets
discussed.
The calculator has his own view of things. What I've discovered
over the years is that minor differences, or changes in certain
properties around the cavity, and certain positions of layers, can
make a big difference in a calculation.
Carothers: I have talked to various DNA people who say,
"Well, you know, one of the things that's really kind of baffling is
we have made what appear to be small changes in our designs, and
we get big differences in things." As Ed Peterson put it, "\ cannot
understand it in the science that I learned, because if someone came
to me and said, 'We're going to make a ten percent change in this,'
I would say, 'Well, we only guessed at the first one, so what can ten
percent do on the next one?'"
Rambo: Yes. I see sensitivities also. The difficulty in
answering the question has to do with which problem you are talking
about. There are so many changes you can make, and I'm not sure
which ones do make a difference. Let me give you an example. Take
Galena, which I presented to the CEP. The approach to it was, from
the people who look at geology and look at material properties,
"Oh, it looks like everything else we've presented before. We've
got all these different Grouse Canyon layers that we've shot next
to." But when I ran the calculation on it, and by the way I did it on
my own, I said, "I think you people may have some problems. I
think we ought to look at it." The containment scientist didn't want
to do that.
Carothers: It's like doing a test with a weapon from the
stockpile. If it works we won't have learned anything, because it's
supposed to work, and if it doesn't work They will know that, and
that's terrible. Similarly, your calculations will show the site is all
right, which we already know, or it won't look all right, and then
you'll give us trouble.
Rambo: You've put your finger on exactly what I go through
sometimes. That's the biggest issue about calculations - -1 really am
not independent of the total system. And so I have this anchor
around me, that you might call wanting to know the truth.
And that brings up the importance of the CEP, because that is

the last decision making process. It isn't the last, but it's close to
the last decision making process that takes place. As we continue
with this process it's going to be harder and harder to move to a
different hole, if that was something that should be done, because
the money situation is probably going to get worse. 1 think that puts
even more responsibility on the CEP to make good judgments on
these kinds of things.
Carothers: Well, the CEP assumes good faith on the part of the
Laboratories. Part of that assumption of good faith is that the
sponsor has looked, seriously and honestly, at the the problems
which might be associated with the shot that is being brought
forward. And, they are going to bring those to the CEP meeting and
discuss them, and why they believe any such problems have been
satisfactorily resolved. If they know of a question, and they do not
bring it to the CEP for consideration, they are willfully subverting
the process.
Rambo: Well, there seems to be this idea that if you run a
calculation there's something wrong with the site. And that almost
stops the process occasionally. It's hard to get away with running
a calculation on something, because the containment scientist is
afraid. "Did you run calculations on this?" "Well, yes." "Why did
you do that? What was wrong with the site that you ran calculations
on it?"
The CEP does have the power, however, to demand a calcula-
tion, if they know enough ahead of time. If you have somebody or
some people on the Panel who say, "This doesn't look right, and we
want to know more about it or we won't pass on it," the calculations
would be done.
Carothers: It's my understanding that these days there's a fair
degree of collaboration between the Los Alamos and Livermore
containment people. Does it ever happen that Los Alamos would
say, "You know, you really ought to calculate this and see what it
says." Does that happen?
Rambo: Yes and no. This usually takes place in communica-
tions before the CEP, in which we send each other questions. That
has happened occasionally. But, it's never happened that we've
demanded calculations from them. I have submitted a question and
said, "Have you run calculations on this, that, and the other?"
maybe twice. But our side never demands any calculations from Los
Alamos, or at least it doesn't seem as though we have, and we have
very rarely if ever run a calculation on one of their sites.
Conversely, Los Alamos has run calculations on our sites
several times. I don't know why this imbalance exists, but I think
it's the perception of calculations from different sides of the fence.
It's as though some of the management on our side is saying, "Well,
calculations don't mean much. They're useful to sell to the CEP."
When we run up against a negative calculation we're maybe a little
more leery, but we're still saying the calculations by themselves
don't make a big difference.
It's good to be aware of that, because the people making the
decision at the CEP are much more savvy about this process than
they used to be in the old days. I think they're able to say, "Well,
this is a negative calculation, but there are other factors that take
place that have to do with containment." I think that has certainly
changed over the years, but we're still living with the remnants of
the ideas that if you show any bad calculation to the Panel, they may
give us a B or C. I think the Panel is a little more savvy in being able
to make intelligent judgments.
Carothers: When you talk about calculations, do you do them
for events of the various yields? Do you, for instance, do calcula-
tions on the low yield events?
Rambo: Sure. Galena was an example of that. The yield was
not high. The layers went from full saturation up to this Grouse
Canyon layer that was enormously porous. That to me was a flag
that said, "Look, this is at the extreme, and you ought to run a
calculation." Eventually I did, somewhat on my own, and that was
presented to the Panel. If I had just laid back and not done anything,
that calculation would not have been done.
What was kind of interesting about it was that it was different
from everything else I've seen in terms of Grouse Canyon related
calculations. There was a tremendous change in the attenuation
rate. And that produced this focusing effect that I talked about -
- the flattening of the out-going wave. For a normal residual stress
you like things to go out spherically and come back spherically so
it tends to close everything up in a spherical sense. When everything
runs up as a plane wave, and comes back that way from the topside,
you don't get a big residual stress. The max cred calculation on
Galena didn't show a residual stress. Nobody knew that at the CEP
because it wasn't asked. The design yield showed a very weak ten,
twenty bar stress along the stemming column.
Carothers: Refering to the Panel again, I think they can make
intelligent judgments if they have the information upon which to
base those judgments. And that's the point that concerns me. If
they don't have all the information, such as not being informed of
your calculations on Galena, how can they make an informed
judgment?
Rambo: Well, you have to remember that certainly our models
for looking at containment calculations leave some things to be
desired. 1 see some of that after looking at comparisons between
real data and the calculations. I'm not trying to sell calculations
necessarily, because 1 know that there are calculations that may be
misleading, and that some of them have been misleading. But in
spite of that, we don't do too bad a job.
There's always been a tendency for there to be higher rise times
in our calculations, compared to the measurements. It's like the
ground is a bigger absorber than we calculate. But 1 think in terms
of residual stress we tend to capture some of that, and yet there are
plenty of arguments that say, "Gee, we don't think there's any
residual stress in any of the shots." The DNA people are starting
to say those kind of things.
The calculators tend to believe the reason the high yield shots
contain is because there's a well established residual stress. You
don't see anything going through cables, the man-made phenom-
enon of the hole is very small, and the residual stress is very thick
compared to the pressure in the cavity.
Now, in the calculations you always seem to generate, for the
same strength rock, the same cavity pressure. On a low yield shot
there is less protective distance than there is on a high yield shot.
When you get to low yield shots the man-made phenomenon
become large with respect to other things, and that's been one of
the ideas behind why low yield shots don't have as good a history
as the high yield ones.
But there is Riola and Agrini. Looking at the geology of those

two shots, there was just nothing there to calculate. There weren't
any nearby layers, and calculations would not have done any good
because they would only have shown a nice residual stress field.
Carothers: If you look at those two events, Riola I put down
as an engineering failure. There were plugs which were supposed to
be stemming platforms, but the one that was called on to actually
do that failed, and was abraded away by the stemming which fell past
it, so it didn't do the job it was supposed to do. On Agrini there
was a strange, very deep crater which must depend on details of the
geology that we'll probably never know.
Rambo: That's right. It's as though there are three aspects to
this; there's the cavity gas, and there's the residual stress problem.
But the third thing that can happen is a strange collapse, or some
geological path that takes material to the surface. And, number
three can bypass number two. If there is an unusual collapse, it may
not matter whether there was a residual stress there in the first
place, or what the calculations showed.
Duff: If we are to make progress in some of these containment
issues, I think we need to think about how we calculate things. In
the containment community we have a world view which assumes
that a one dimensional, spherical expansion is the proper view of an
explosion. That's where it all starts.
A zero-order approximation is a 1 -D calculation. If you want
to know about the effects of in-situ stress, or lithographic stress, you
go to a 2-D calculation and put in gravity. And what do you know?
You get a slightly different result.
So, we start with a one dimensional world. I'm suggesting that
perhaps ground motion, for instance, in the DNA context, is
governed by the scale of a fault or bedding plane type displacement,
which is large compared to the cell size of a computation. Or
certainly large compared to the size of the core we're going to
squeeze in a press, but small compared to the final cavity dimen-
sions. And it may be that the one dimensional approximation in this
case isn't even a good zero-order approximation to what's going on.
I don't know what that means. I certainly don't know how to
calculate it, or how to think about doing such a calculation. And
that's something that has been thrown at me every time I make this
kind of an argument; that we really ought to open our minds to think

about something beyond where we've been before. They say,
"Well, gosh, we don't know how to calculate it." If that's the limit
of our world, and the limit of our world view, we're sure not going
to change that view. And we may not learn the truth.
Carothers: May I rephrase what I think you said? You're
saying that the world is inhomogeneous on a scale which is large
compared to your computational meshes, but small compared to
the region in which the phenomena important to containment take
place.
Duff: Perhaps. 1 have to emphasize the perhaps in all this. I've
made a point in my career, and I've tried to make the point here that
I was interested in trying to develop an understanding of what was
going on, more than concentrating on getting the next shot off, or
trying to meet a schedule. It's in this context of trying to understand
something that I think the containment community, and I as a
significant member of that community, have failed.
And that part of the failure has been in not recognizing the
lessons that were learned from Rainier. One reason for me making
this point was that within the last few years I went back and reread
the Livermore reports on Rainier. They are kind of an interesting
thing to look at. I commend them to the Panel. That event was
extensively, and very carefully reentered and studied as an example
of an underground test.
There is a statement in the reports that the cavity is reasonably
well formed, and well defined. It's pretty spherical. And for a
meter or so outside of the cavity the rock seems to be plastically
deformed, and moves in pretty much a 1-D sense. Beyond that,
ground motion is dominated by slips on faults, on bedding planes,
and on fractures. Within a meter or so of the cavity ! That is, to
me, evidence in the books, from the first shot, that says perhaps the
one dimensional world view is not the proper world view.
Carothers: Good out to a cavity radius plus a meter, maybe?
Duff: Yes. But if you have a stemming column which goes out
a little further, you may not get the right answers. But it is very hard
to get real data, and actual observations. And we deal with the very
real personal attitudes of the people in the loop. If you think you
know what's going on, and it sort of works, and there's nothing
dramatic that makes you change your view, you say, "Gee, that
must be the way it is." It has been shown time after time that we
don't know that's the way it is. As witness to that look at Mighty
Oak, or Mission Cyber and Disko Elm.
I have criticized continuum-mechanics based codes as inappro-
priate because the basic assumption that points that start out close
together stay close together during the motion is not, apparently,
what is observed in the field. Therefore, I have recommended that
effort be directed towards the development of a three-dimensional
discrete element calculational technique.
Discrete-element is basically a two-dimensional calculational
procedure put together some fifteen or twenty years ago by a man
named Peter Cundall. He's now at the University of Wisconsin. The
technique, basically, imagines that you have interacting blocks of
rock, which are are defined preshot, unfortunately. Unfortunately
for our case, because we don't know what's in the earth in any great
detail. But for civil engineering applications, for which he devel-
oped this technique, it's adequate.
In such a calculation there are predefined blocks of material,
which in the first approximation are rigid, so these blocks can
interact only through interfaces, where there are frictional forces
that are defined. There have been extensions to the theory to allow
elastic type distortions to occur also. The beauty of the technique
is that one block is free to do whatever the forces that are at play
ask it to do. It can change its neighbors however it wants to. It is
not restricted to the continuum-mechanics assumption that there
are proximity relationships that are maintained, nor is it restricted
by the slip-line constraints that have sometimes been put into 2-D
continuum-mechanics codes Those, I think, are always restricted to
one class of boundaries which can slip. The ] lines can slip, or the
K lines can slip, but not both of them. In the discrete element codes
both can.
Let me give you an example of problems I have seen calculated,
on personal computers by the way. We'll take a hopper containing
an arbitrary array of defined objects; square blocks, round blocks,
triangular blocks, you name it. They're sitting in the hopper under
gravity. Remove a diaphragm at the bottom of the hopper. The
blocks are allowed to flow out under gravity, and they start sliding
down. One will fall out, and another one will fall out, and they will
tumble, and fall, and they will pile up and do what they do in
complete freedom from the constraints of usual continuum-me-
chanics calculational procedures.
Now, this calculational technique has been known, as I said, for
fifteen or twenty years. There has been work on it at Livermore, and
there has been work on it, supported by DNA, through Waterways
Experiment Station. I don't know that it has been generalized to 3-
D, but my recommendation is that a serious effort be made to try
to bring up a practical and effective three-dimensional discrete
element technique.
Carothers: My comment is that the development of calculational
tools and codes within the Laboratories has been dominated, in the
past, by the device designers. People were, and are, intensely
interested in what happens inside a device when you fire it. That's
where the the big kids play. That's where the interest, the money,
and the effort has been, and so they have developed very sophisti-
cated and elaborate ways to make those calculations. And in a
device there are no blocks moving around, or hydrofractures, and
they are usually symmetrical about some axis. If you're just a little
guy who comes along and wants to do some calculations concerning
dirt and rocks that maybe crack or jiggle around, you're probably
not going to get a lot of money to do that. And so, maybe you adapt
some of those techniques that have already been developed to your
problem. That might be one of the reasons that has led to the
widespread use of the continuum-mechanics techniques you de-
scribe.
Duff: I believe that.
Carothers: Chuck, inherent in the efforts to model, or
calculate, the phenomenology of an underground detonation, par-
ticularly where you have a Iine-of-sight pipe, there is an enormous
range of time scales. Things important occur from fractions of a
microsecond to more than many minutes. Similarly, spatially, you
have a thin piece of iron which is maybe going to do something and
interact with things, and then you have, if you want to believe in
block motion, a piece of rock, probably bigger this building, moving
around.
Dismukes: You're giving good reasons why the modeling is not
as simple as one would like.
Carothers: How do you deal with those things?

Dismukes: Not very well.
Carothers: You deal with it well enough to be successful some
of the time.
Dismukes: Apparently. Or we're successful in spite of our
ignorance. That's always possible. It could be that just doing
everything on the back of an envelope would work every bit as well.
It doesn't give you a lot of confidence that you know the effect of
parametric changes in the design. We do a lot of that by the way
- - not thinking the code is giving us the right answer, but that it will
tell us what the influence of design changes are. Hopefully it will
suggest what's good and bad when we start changing things.
Carothers: Without saying how good, or how bad.
Dismukes: Exactly. And that's the primary use of the codes,
I think. I don't think any of us are deluded to the point where we
think we're predicting exactly what happens.
Carothers: Where do the codes come from? Do you develop
them?
Dismukes: It's a mixture. We've obtained some from the Labs.
One of our early-time codes is really very similar to Livermore's
CORONET.
Carothers: Your codes are all basically two dimensional, aren't
they? Which came first, the codes or the pipe?
Dismukes: The codes. The codes were designed to deal with
nuclear devices, which really were symmetric. The codes came first,
because I think we were reluctant to experiment with non-symmet-
ric test configurations because we didn't know how to calculate
them.
Primarily the codes are two dimensional. Certain radiation
problems you might do one dimensionally if you wanted. You could
put in a little more sophistication because you could put better
transport in for some things. In principle you can do that in 2-D
also, but it gets expensive. The problem with 2-D codes is that they
assume the world is axially symmetric. So, you get perfect
symmetry, typically around the axis of the line-of-sight pipe. That
would suggest that you probably get more jetting and energy flow
in calculations than you do in the real world, because nothing is
perfectly symmetric. Certainly the stemming and the placement of

the pipe in the tunnel is not axially symmetric; it's only quasi-axially
symmetric.
The pipe is symmetric, but it's not located symmetrically. The
tunnel itself is not mined symmetrically, and the pipe is not placed
exactly in the center of the tunnel. There are support structures,
and possibly experiment stations on one side and not on the other,
and generally that's ignored. The codes are basically two dimen-
sional codes that calculate cylindrical, axially symmetric kinds of
things, and there's no dependence on the axial angle.
Broyles: I still find myself concerned about the role of
calculations and the lack of what I think of as an appreciation of the
limitations of 2-D calculations versus a real 3-D world. There are
a number of people on the CEP, and other places also, who still think
of 2-D calculations as the ultimate calculation, not recognizing what
to me is a very serious limitation of 2-D calculations. That is the fact
that in the 2-D expansion, instead of a 3-D one, you can, particu-
larly in complex geometry, produce a calculation which can scare
you to death, when there is no reason in the real world to be scared.
In a 3-D world things go as 1 over R cubed when you talk about
reflections and things like that, instead as 1 over R squared. I
suppose that's a minor point, because it may cost you money and
effort unnecessarily, but if you're aiming to be conservative it's at
least in the right direction.
People can certainly do better 2-D calculations today than they
could fifteen years ago. They have also learned to do parameter
studies with 2-D calculations in a much better way, and apply them
better. I think an area that can be exploited more is that we do have
3-D calculational capabilities now, particularly for late time, slow,
ground motion calculations. In many cases those can be the
important response, particularly for the tunnel collapse, the up-
heavals, the fault motions.
Bass: With the thought in mind that block motion could affect
the residual stress field, through our DNA Containment Advisory
Team working group we asked that a certain problem be run, and
that we be aprised of the results of it. We wanted a discrete element
code used, and S-Cubed was tasked to do it. We asked them to put
a fault in, and see what that does to the stress cage. And indeed,
those calculations show that if the fault is in the wrong place, it kills
the stress cage.
Now, you don't need a discrete element code to do that. Any
finite difference code will tell you the same thing. But the finite
difference code will only tell you about one fault. You can't put in
several faults. With these discrete elements codes you can put in
numerous faults, and address an area. We have recommended, and
I think someday somebody will do something about it, that if a DN A
test area shows multiple faults in what we call the stress cage region
that should be addressed with a discrete element code. I think we
need to do this.
Certainly a finite element code can go 3-D a hell of a lot easier
than a finite difference code. Sandia has some going; certainly a lot
of people have some going, but they are not being used, as far as 1
can see. We're really falling behind with what we should be doing
with 3-D codes. We have the capability now to run those codes.
People can still think, and with the capabilities we have now we
should be running 3-D problems, and people aren't. All of the 3-
D calculations have just kind of died.
Patch: Even a 1 -D code is useful in a lot of material property
studies. It's fast, and it does some of those sorts of things pretty
well. Almost all of our serious work is done in 2-D. We do limited
work in 3-D, and we're prepared to do it. It's just that one has to
be sure that there is something that is truly 3-D, and that the 3-D
effects are so important that you can either give up on the zoning
resolution that you can achieve in 2-D, or you bite the bullet and
pay the cost of doing a 3-D simulation. There are instances when
one does that, but they're relatively rare.
I think the most effective way to use 3-D calculations is to home
in on limited features. For example, you could ask yourself, "Does
it really matter that the tunnel has a horseshoe shape as opposed to
a circular shape that the 2-D code forces it into?" In addition to
that, DNA typically offsets the Iine-of-sight pipe. They put it on one
side of the tunnel so people can walk on the other side because it
makes it nicer to work. So now you have a funny shaped thing with
the Iine-of-sight pipe set off in one corner. Is that important?
The way you do that in 3-D is not to mock up everything from

the zero room to infinity, but you take a section of it and look to
see whether it behaves in a sensible fashion. You can make a lot of
progress in 3-D as long you restrict yourself to a particular question.
What you often times need in 3-D is to run a benchmark in 1-D or
2-D, so you can say it's 10% more, or it's 100% more, or 0.2%
more. Many times, using a 3-D code, you get an answer, but you
don't have any scale, so you have to invent your measurement tool
to go with it.
We're currently working on getting a 3-D axial, and quasi-axial
symmetric code in which things can vary with the azimuth. At that
point 1 think we can begin to investigate some of the things we see
with more confidence.
Carothers: You'd be able to do something like having the wall
thickness vary?
Dismukes: Yes. Or you could even have a cross section be
slightly asymmetrical. The problem with that kind of code is that
if you get to large distances you don't have good angular resolution,
but maybe you don't need it there. You can put good angular
resolution where you need it, near the pipe. I have high hopes that
one day we'll be able to do something with that code. It's just about
to come on line.
The usual event in an emplacement hole doesn't have the
complexities of a Iine-of-sight event in the tunnels. So, as Fred App
and ]ohn Rambo have pointed out, calculations of the phenomenol-
ogy following such a detonation are not regarded as very important
in the planning of an event. And so, development of better
calculational tools is not an very high priority project at the
Laboratories. Part of the reason for that is that one could argue
better codes would have to have better input data, which is not
availabe, nor likely to become available.
App: I think the important thing is that we are in a very data-
limited environment. There's no doubt about that. And that's the
reason we're not predictive. We're not constrained by enough data.
We're data limited. I think we have pretty strong analysis capabili-
ties, but we have to always couch it as, "These are the limits of how
this rock might really behave." Or, "These are the limits we might
have on the phenomenology." We are not truly predictive.
Carothers: How useful would a 3-D code be?

A p p : I don't think a whole lot more useful to us. There may
be some special circumstances where we might want to know what
the effect of a fault is, or something like that. I think that 9 5 % of
the cases, even if we had a beautiful 3-D code, would probably still
be done in 2-D. The world is, to a first approximation, with layering
and all, two dimensional. We still do a lot of useful one dimensional
calculations, and the world certainly isn't one dimensional.
Now, there are specific cases you might want to look at with
a 3-D code. You might want to look at a three dimensional
geometry to assess the assumptions made in a two dimensional case.
For example, how might a sloping layer affect the results, and in
what way? But even then I think we normally would use a two
dimensional code for the main part of the study. I think that's how
we would approach it. A 3-D calculation is an order of magnitude
more expensive to do, and more complicated besides.
And again, in 3-D we are still data limited. How are we going
to know how things vary in three dimensions any better than we do
in two? The real problem lies with the material properties. I think
that's the real issue; the material response.
Carothers: Dan, how do you get the numbers, or the informa-
tion to build your material models?
Patch: That comes about in a lot of different ways, and
hopefully each way adds a little bit of information, so the composite
of all those little bits of information makes the model, with its
strengths and its failings. The codes, because we've spent a lot of
time perfecting what I'll call numerical techniques, by and large do
an extremely good job of solving the equations of motion, and doing
all the things they should do when they have the right kind of zoning.
But they only do what the material model is. So the material model
in these calculations is far and away the most important factor, or
unknown, or uncertainty in the calculations.
We are frequently accused of just taking the post-shot data and
tuning the calculations until they give the best agreement, and then
using that model until something new comes in, then tuning again.
While I can't speak for others, 1 don't think that's an accurate
description of what I do, and 1 don't believe it's an accurate
description of what a number of other people do either. We try very
hard to make a model based on information that comes from tests

on the rock itself, and not from some kind of global empirical data
base. And so, it is always personally bothersome to me when people
say, "Oh yeah, they just tune their models. They only reason their
models do what they do is because they've adjusted all these
knobs." That, 1 think, is a very unfair characterization of what we
do. That's not been our approach.
Certainly we compare the results of the calculations to what
happens. It wouldn't make sense if we didn't. That's just a basic
way of verifying that the calculations are doing the right thing, and
often times they don't. Certainly there are sometimes minor
features, sometimes major features we're not happy with. I think
the appropriate question then to ask yourself is not which knob do
I have to turn to get this thing to come out right, but to ask yourself
which piece of physics is missing from the numerical models, or if
it seems like one knob has been turned the wrong direction, how can
that be? It is not to simply say, "Well, if I adjust this part of the
model everything is wonderful," and go on. To me that's not
science at all, and the implication that we do that I find very
bothersome. So, our approach, at least philosophically, has been to
verify the calculations, and when we have a problem to use that as
a red flag to ask what's missing, and what do we need to measure,
and then try to devise some way of getting this new material
property we haven't had before. And we're not always successful
in doing that. We certainly have our mysteries.
There are a number of models, and each has its drawbacks, and
each has its uncertainties. I suppose, to some extent, one rejects
those models which give features that just don't seem to be
consistent with what the experience in the field is, and if someone
wants to say that's how we're tuning the calculations, by winnowing
through alternative kinds of models, in that sense I suppose we are
tuning the models by rejecting those that seem to be non-physical.
Carothers: I don't know what else you can do. I find it hard
to think that you could sit down and from first principles derive a
model that would describe what goes on in this very complicated
material under rather unusual circumstances.
Patch: If there were something else I could think of, I'd do it.
Rambo: Over the years of doing these things I've tried to bring
some ideas together about how calculations play some role in some
shots, and on other shots they really don't play any significant role
at all. I was looking at what happened after the shot. What's the
report card look like? How well did we do; did the calculations mean
anything at all?
There's a group of shots that we've done calculations on where
we were trying to deal with issues that were of interest for a number
of reasons, where people felt there were containment issues that
needed to be calculated, and the calculations did matter. We've run
these calculations on a lot of events, and they looked okay. And at
least in looking at the post-shot analyses where we're looking at
radiation, we didn'tsee anything. So in a sense the calculations have
been helpful to kind of get things through the CEP, and maybe
there's a connection between the calculations and the fact that we
didn't see anything.
Then there's the area that I call kind of worrisome. Worrisome
areas are like Roquefort and Coso. Roquefort was probably in the
thirty-some kiloton category and had radioactivity that went past
the bottom two plugs, and we'd run calculations and presented
them to the CEP. It bothers me to run these things and say, "Well,
there's still a residual stress even though there's this hard layer that
runs through it and there's a lot of perturbation, and there's this
Grouse Canyon layer that's close by. It bothers me, to some extent,
to run these things and go down to the CEP and say, "Gee, I didn't
see anything calculationally." And then afterwards, think maybe
there was something I should have talked about.
As a postscript to this chapter, and a case study of the current
role of calculations on an emplacement hole event is the Barnwell
event. Barnwell, with a yield in the 20 to 150 kiloton range, was
fired in Area 20, on 12/08/89. John Rambo was the Livermore
containment scientist.
Carothers: ]ohn, I know you were quite concerned about the
containment of Barnwell. And, let me say that if anyone were to
look carefully at the post-shot data on Barnwell, they might
conclude that your apprehensions were well founded. There are
people who think Barnwell came very close to being a containment
failure.
Rambo: I guess I'm one of those people, even though 1 didn't

say it publicly. Barnwell. Well, in the beginning we didn't suspect
there were any problems whatsoever. It was down toward the
southern end Area 20, in 20az, in new territory, so to speak.
Carothers: It had a yield in a range where we've never had a
problem.
Rambo: Or never had seen a problem. Sometimes we haven't
looked.
Carothers: We've never had an escape of material in that yield
range.
Rambo: That's right. And we didn't on Barnwell either. But
that's what we're really discussing. In the beginning I decided to do
calculations for an issue that had to do with the CEP, and that was
a possible low scaled depth of burial. There was uncertainty in what
the maximum credible yield was. We couldn't lower the device any
deeper in the hole because the hole was crooked and we'd get
alignment problems. So, as the containment scientist I was stuck
with a depth of six hundred meters, and I was going to run
calculations for scaled depth of burial purposes.
There, the CEP played an important role for the wrong reasons.
The whole thing was serendipitous. It was really that way. The
material properties, for up on the Pahute, came right in the center
to about everything we've looked at in past experience. And the
logs were straight as a board. We didn't see any reflections for two
hundred meters. It just looked marvelous.
So, I didn't see any problem with the shot. The one thing I did
see was, "Gee, the drilling rates for that last two hundred meters
look kind of slow." I hadn't seen anything that looked quite like
that, but we've had experiences in hard layers here and there and
all over the place, and the geology for the Molbo event was like that
for quite a ways, and there was no problem there. And so I just
tossed it off. "There's no problem with this shot."
Another factor that was important here was that to exercise
our ability to measure core samples we went in and took some core
samples and measured them in the laboratory. But as a test, before
we got the answers back, they said, "John Rambo, we want you to
make an estimate of what you think the strength is of this rock."
Well, I looked at one version, which was the Butkovich model, which
gives you default values of strength, and I looked at that. I looked

at a nearby shot called Hardin, where we had samples that were
measured, and I looked at the Hardin cavity radius, from which I
could back-calculate strengths. I looked a little bit at the drilling
rates, because I had some ideas about what they tell you. Well, I
increased the strength quite a bit from the default values that you
would get from Butkovich's model, which takes average properties.
I came up with a value that was about half of what the measured
values were from the laboratory measurements. That rock was
much stronger than I'd estimated.
Later on I had some DNA calculators estimate it, and they said,
"Yeah, that's about what we would have estimated too," meaning
their estimates would have looked like my estimates.We looked at
the inside of the hole with the movie log, and it looked like it was
uniform stuff all the way up. We didn't see any cracks, we didn't
see anything but uniform material. But, above that layer there was
a layer with a lot of gas porosity. We took samples out of that layer,
and you could break them apart in your hand.
So I ran the first calculation. A big Shockwave goes up,
traveling in almost fully saturated material up to this two hundred
meter level in hard rock. Then it comes to this layer of very weak
rock. Lo and behold ! An enormous reflection comes back. In the
calculation, just as the rock tries to hit rebound, or to set up the
residual stress field, the reflection caused motion which unloaded
the residual stress field around the cavity. I just didn't expect that.
This calculation looked bad. It had three hundred bars of cavity
pressure, and almost nothing outside of it. I had never seen a
calculation show something as bad as that.
So, the next object was what we could do to try to save this
shot. They said, "Nothing is going to happen." I said, "Well, I'm
not sure you could even contain the gases getting up into the
stemming column on this." So they said, "Oh, all right," and went
back and measured down below the shot, where we thought there
was weaker rock, because the drilling rates were higher. And sure
enough it was weaker. I put this new model into the calculation, and
yes, that helped reduce the cavity pressure in the calculation about
to the point where it was equal or about the same level as the
residual stress. That made me a little happier, except that when you
went to lower yields the effect of this weak material below the shot
point started to go away.
So, I knew all this, and I went down to the CEP, prepared to
present it to the Panel, if necessary. I thought we ought to be able
to contain this thing because it was right on the edge, and besides,
nobody on the Panel believes in calculations. I came down with
about six notebooks full of viewgraphs to present in case somebody
wanted to get into the subject. The rest is history. Dr. Brownlee
said, "Calculations don't make any difference." Fred App was
starting to get interested in the subject, but he was sort of swept
away by Brownlee's strong statement. I was sitting there with my
mouth open, thinking, "Boy, did I get through this one easy."
But I was still quite worried about what might happen, because
in my calculational experience I had never seen anything quite like
it. On the other side of the slate, we had all the experience of high
yield events that had never shown any problems. 1 even went over
and calculated a nearby event, called Lockney. I didn't have any
measurements, but I tried to back-calculate from the cavity radius
and the drilling rates. It didn't look good either, but it was very,
very sensitive to minor changes in strength. That was what was
interesting about this whole thing. We didn't appreciate how, with
high strength you can get these enormous changes in residual stress
for slightly different properties. It comes and goes with very minor
differences in the strength, and it can be catastrophic if you hit the
right combination of timing and of reflections.
As I said, Lockney showed poor residual stress also. But it
contained. Lockney had something like five percent water content,
and Fred App has calculated other events where he says, "You
know, the calculations look pretty bad up there on Pahute, but
there's still this very low water content that they're shooting in."
And so, I thought at the time that maybe they were right. Maybe
containment calculations don't make any difference on high yield
shots. Maybe you can shoot anywhere, in any material, and who
cares. So that did affect my thinking on Barnwell.
So, I was concerned already, and then about ten minutes
before shot time the device physicist came up, and remember that
this thing gets worse as you go to lower yields, and he said, "By the
way, I just did another calculation. You'll be pleased to know the
yield has gone down." It wasn't more than about twenty minutes
later that I saw all this radiation going up through the stemming
column, up to the last plug. I think we came very close on Barnwell,
and the calculations certainly pointed in that direction.
523
20
Current Practice
Over the years the Laboratories have developed certain prac-

tices for the conduct of nuclear operations at the Test Site, including
those which relate to containment. After all the theorizing, the
designing, the calculating and the planning has been done it is the
people in the field who do those things that make the reality of a
nuclear event.
From the earliest days of nuclear test work it was recognized
that a field operation was a very complex undertaking. Leaving
aside the many organizations that were involved in planning, build-
ing, providing, and operating the necessary support functions, there
was the need to coordinate the activities of the Laboratory people
themselves. The Test Directors were the people who had the
ultimate responsibility to see that the plans for a particular event
were carried out. They served as the authority, at the Site, for the
work that was to be done, and that would be done for an event
sponsored by their organization. There were several interfaces to be
managed; those between the Test Site management, the various
support contractors, the Laboratory management, and a multitude of
Laboratory people, each with a strong interest in having their
experiment taken care of first. Meeting the containment require-
ments was just another part of the job. How these things are done
has changed over the years.
The responsibility for the direction of the Livermore field
program is shared by two Test Directors.
Carothers: What does a Livermore Test Director do?
Page: That's a big question. I consider the Test Director,
foremost, to be an operations manager for a large field project. A
big part of the responsibility has to do with safety.
Carothers: Does it include the things related to containment?
Page: That's a part of it, but the real focus on that belongs to
the containment group. But since the Test Director is the man
responsible, on the spot, he essentially owns all of those aspects, to
first order, from nuclear safety to containment to industrial safety.
Roth: You pick up an event somewhere in its definition stage,
and actual production stage. When the event becomes active in the
field, the Test Director becomes the lead man in charge of it at that
point in time. He picks up that responsibility from a project
physicist, who shepherds it from its inception to the point where it's
going to the field. I concern myself, first of all, with getting the
fielding done, making sure the facilities are available for the
canisters and experiments that have to be fielded, coordinating the
craft support to carry that out, determining the safety and security
requirements of classified gear in the field.
Carothers: Let me start with industrial safety. When do you
become responsible for that? I would think REECO, for instance,
would do that.
Page: There a couple of aspects to that, but the Test Director
assumes ESscH coordination responsibility from the DOE for the
shot site at a certain time. It's a formal transition of responsibility.
Up until that time N VO had assigned that to REECO, and so REECO
had that responsibility. When that transition happens, then the
Laboratory gets it, and the Test Director is the person who assumes
that responsibility. What that means is that he is responsible for the
coordination of the activities at the shot site to assure that they're
done safely, that all the independent contractors know what's going
on, and that they know what the other people are doing. He has the
responsibility to make sure there is a well-coordinated operation.
Of course, each contractor is responsible to assure that their people
know their jobs, and that they do them safely. But the contractors
take their direction from the Laboratory, and then they apply their
methods to get the job done.
The craft support is all through the contractors. REECO
provides the crafts we need. For security, we call heavily on
Wackenhut to do the guard duty we require. We determine the
requirements and we lay those requirements on those people, and
they, hopefully, carry them out, and we oversee that they are
carried out to our specifications.
Current Practice 525
As things progress I become very busy in overseeing the

emplacement of the canister in the hole - - the handling of the
cables, the operation of the cranes, all the necessary activities that
go along with the carrying out of the event. Also, I oversee the
stemming and containment requirements, making sure that the
materials that are put in directly around the canister and around the
bomb itself meet the required specifications, and that the various
plugs, and the gas blocks are properly installed. There are a myriad
of details like that.
Roth: The legality of it is that the Test Director is in charge,
but of course, it's a cooperative effort with a lot people involved,
and you listen to what they have to say.
Carothers: Let us say the device has been delivered. Inside
that fence is the Laboratory's area, your area, isn't it?
Roth: That's right. You're talking about a safety and security
issue now, but at a point in time, which I normally define as a
significant Laboratory presence and activity, that's when 1 legally
take responsibility for that site from DOE. Basically that's when the
diagnostic canister first comes out to the site and gets installed in the
tower, and significant work and activity goes on in finalizing the
experiments. That's inside the perimeter fence, of course.
That is not normally the time when security is on the site.
Security is usually not established until significant classified material
comes on the site. In some cases there won't be any classified
material in the tower where they're installing diagnostic equipment,
depending on what kind of event it is. So, it could be as late as a
day or two before the full power dry runs before we establish
security on the site. And full power is typically a few days before
device delivery. But from that point in time we have a secured site,
where you have guards on a twenty-four hour basis, making sure
only authorized people are allowed access to the site.
Carothers: You said that you legally take over the responsibil-
ity for that area inside that perimeter fence. That means you have
the responsibility for the actions of the contractors' people?
Roth: We interface with those people through a group at the
Test Site which used to be called the Emgineering and Construction
group, but that has been recently changed to C&tDE; Construction
and Drilling Engineering. They actually do the interfacing with the
contractors. They give the requirements for the number of carpen-

ters, and wiremen, and so forth that will be needed on a particular
day. They interface with the craft people, with REECO, on a day
to day basis. And they essentially report to me, from the standpoint
of getting instructions about when we need the tower up, or what
we need there, or where we need a work station, and so on. And,
they implement those instructions. So, I don't deal directly with the
crafts, but they are reacting to my requirements.
I'm responsible for safety, and security, ultimately. That again
js a delegated effort; I can't be in every location at every point in
time. You have to depend on a lot of people to uphold those
requirements. But ultimately it rests on me.
Carothers: Usually only when something goes wrong. Then
it's suddenly, "Well, Bernie's the guy in charge. Go see him."
Roth: That's right. They never say that when everything is
going smoothly. When something goes wrong, everybody's willing
to admit I'm responsible.
Carothers: Do you get involved in the site selection?
Page: No. Only to the extent that the site meets the needs of
the field operation, and will allow us to do the experiment we want
to do. It has to be the right depth, it has to be the right diameter,
it has to have enough room for the trailer park. Ground motion is
a big issue, and you don't want the hole located where there could
be damage to some facility.
Roth: Somebody says, "We have a device here of X yield, and
we need a hole to accommodate it." That falls into the containment
area, and they say, "Oh yeah, we have holes A, B, C, D. Then they
look at the yield, and the device, and determine the depth of burial
that's required, and they say, "Well, this is the hole it should go in."
If there are unique requirements for some reason we may suggest
differently, but basically that's how it happens.
I don't say where a new hole should be drilled. The geology
people and the Test Site people make that decision. But we have
kept a running cognizance of what holes are available, and as a drill
rig becomes available we might say, "We need another high yield
hole on Pahute someplace, so give us a high yield hole." Then we
coordinate that with other activities to see that we're not a half mile
away from another high yield event that could go off in the same
time period. But the specific location and coordinates are not my
choice. That's the geologists.
Carothers: Jack, as the Los Alamos Containment Program

Manager, what interaction do you have with the J-6 field operations
people? Do they work for you, or are they a separate organization?
House: They are separate and apart. First of all, they are in
a different division. Although containment is in the Environmental
and Earth Sciences Division, we work for J Division. I consider Jay
Norman, the J Division Leader and Program Director for Test, to be
my technical boss. Field operations, J-6, are people we work hand
in hand with from the very first definition of an event, when we have
to go pick a hole.
Carothers:; Who selects the site for a new emplacement hole?
House: I do that. I and a colleague in J-6 work hand in glove
on the site selection; where are we going to drill the hole, and how
deep are we going to drill it, and so on. I may have picked a set of
coordinates on the NTS map that, when the field operations folks
actually go out with the surveyors to drive a stake, they find is in an
arroyo, or is near a power line, or what have you. So, there is a lot
of interaction with the J-6 people. Those guys do not work for us;
we work together. They also take our containment criteria and
develop a relatively standard and basic stemming plan for each and
every event.
Carothers: Jack, you always have the same stemming plan.
House: Well yes, more or less. It's got the same basic
ingredients. It's got alternating layers of coarse and fines material.
And it's got a grout plug here, and two TPE plugs there, but the
locations of those are specified by the containment scientist, and his
or her event team. J-6 merely translates their requirements into a
blue-line drawing, which ultimately goes to the field for execution.
Among other differences in the way Livermore and Los Alamos

conduct their field operations is the manner in which they lower the
device and diagnostics hardware down hole. Los Alamos uses wire-
rope harnesses, Livermore uses drill pipe. The origins of the
difference seem to be lost in the past.
House: If there are valid reasons for the difference, I am not

aware of them. I do understand that Livermore is able, on drill pipe,
to put a much heavier package down hole than Los Alamos can, even
on a four wire-rope harness. We started in the early days just using
two wire-rope harnesses. And, as the diagnostic packages got
larger, and longer, and heavier, obviously the capability to lower
larger packages became necessary, and they added more wire-ropes.
There are now two, three, and four rope configurations they use,
depending on the size and weight of the package. But as far as how
the difference between the two Laboratories as to drill pipe versus
wire-rope came about, I don't have the vaguest idea.
In the Test Operations Review Team activities, which has since
turned into a effort that is known as the Joint Test Organization,
which has the aim of combining Livermore and Los Alamos re-
sources at the Test Site, there has been a consideration of using one
system or the other. Interestingly enough, long and hard as it has
been studied, 1 think the ultimate resolution was, "Well, Los Alamos
will stay with wire-rope harnesses unless we get a package that is just
absolutely too big, and then we'll do it using the Livermore system."
So, it's still unresolved.
Carothers: Perhaps you know, Bernie. Livermore emplaces
the device and diagnostic hardware using drill pipe. Los Alamos
uses wire-rope. Why is there a difference? I'm sure you think drill
pipe is better. Is it really, or is it just another difference between
practices of the Laboratories?
Roth: Those preferences were developed before I became
really established in the program. I remember seeing one or two of
our events put down on flat wire rope. That was still in the
developmental, or experimental stage at that time. Before I got fully
on board that was put aside and everything was done on drill pipe
after that.
So, I grew up with drill pipe. One reason for it that I'm aware
of is that drill pipe has a much higher weight capacity for putting
down a package than a wire-rope set. It's been developed over the
years to where we can put a million or more pounds down hole, and
we have done that on a few occasions. The one event that comes
to mind was Flax, and if I remember the number right we were
looking at a 940,000 to 960,000 pound load. Los Alamos has
gone from one cable to two cables to four cables, but I think even
their four cable capacity does not equal our heavier drill pipe
capacity.
Page: I can't answer the question of why we first started using
drill pipe, but the reason we like using it today is that drill pipe offers
a heavy load carrying capability. We believe the joining method is
reliable, and it's something we can test. And, we've had good luck
with it.
Carothers: What do you mean when you say it's something you
can test? Do you pull test all those joints?
Page: Yes we do. Of course, then we have to unmake them.
Roth: There's a very strict quality control program involved in
all of that. The pipes are first of all threaded and inspected, and then
pull tested to some 125 or 150% of what the working load is
expected to be. They are then very carefully maintained from that
point on to see that they aren't damaged in any way, even to the
extent of seeing that somebody doesn't sabotage one of them.
They're brought to the event site, put into an enclosed area, and
maintained there until they're used. The threading operation itself
has a quality control on it, in that the pipe joint makeup has to fit
within certain tolerances. The threaded joints are marked with a
small diamond, so they have to thread up into some portion of that
diamond. Going too far or too short is not acceptable. So, we have
very good assurance when we go to lift that load that joint is going
to be good, and that pipe is going to be good. And it's special metal.
It's not necessarily old D-36 steel; it's API pipe.
Carothers: Do you have to use a drill rig to put the device
down?
Page: No. You can use a drill rig, but the emplacement
machine can be a crane, =» sub-base, and a stabbing tower. The sub-
base is a working platform that allows us to tie off the load when we
let go of it with the crane. The process works pretty well, and it's
reasonably fast.
Roth: The crane actually holds the load, and lowers it pipe
section by pipe section. And we use ancillary cranes that feed the
pipe up to the stabbing tower. The drillers thread it in, the main
crane picks up the load, releases it from the grips, and lowers it
down. People underneath the sub-base tie on the cables and put on
the experiments that go on the pipe.
Carothers: Once it's in place, you have to fill the center of that
pipe.
Roth: Yes, but that's relatively easy. We just grout it up.
There is a stemming plan for the hole that we adhere to that's
defined, and reviewed, and accepted prior to the time we actually
carry it out. That involves perhaps a half dozen different types of
material. Boron rich material might be emplaced around the device
itself, for neutron shielding. Above that, depending on what the
diagnostic requirements are, we have overton sand, or perhaps
magnetite, perhaps sometimes a mix for neutron shielding. Once
above the canister, generally it winds down to a sand, gravel, and
eventually a plug configuration.
Gas Blocks and Fanouts
Carothers: Who at Los Alamos designs cable fanouts and cable

gas blocks?
House: The field engineering folks do that, and then they bring
the design to the containment group for review. We have specs, and
both Los Alamos and Livermore use the same specs for field
installed, or discrete, gas blocks. While the two Laboratories' field
installed gas blocks are of slightly different design, they are the same
end product, in essence, in what they are designed to do, and the
pressures they are designed to meet, and so forth. But the
containment program does not design the gas blocks. They endorse
the specifications, such as the need to have a 125 psi gas block for
this particular function, and so on.
The fiber optic cables are supposed to be continually gas
blocked, and if they don't meet the pressure test that's done on each
and every cable, then you've got to strip the coating back to the
fibers and discretely gas block them.
Carothers: Let's say you have a reel of fiber optic cable. You
cut off ten feet don't you, and test that? What if it doesn't meet
that test?
House: Then you don't use that reel, or you put a discrete gas
block in the run. You put the blocks in at the standard locations
where you have designated gas blocks for the multi-conductor
cable. In our particular geometries there are typically three places,
one in each of the rigid plugs, where gas blocks are placed.
Carothers: What's your experience with the fiber optic cables?
Do many of them fail your pressure test?
House: It's probably about thirty percent that fail, that leak
enough so they don't meet the specs. They are supposed to come
from the factory, by design, as continually gas blocked fiber optic
cables. But, when they sit in the Nevada desert sun, or lie out in a
cable way before they've been terminated, there's a degradation
that takes place. It in many cases causes the cable not to pass the
test, and then you've got to go in and discretely gas block them.
The fiber optic cable is a very small diameter cable — maybe
a 1/2 inch outside diameter, which of course includes the sheath
and the protective jacket, and so on. By the time you get down to
the potential flow path for gas up one of those cables, it's very small.
It's hard to envision gas being driven very far up one of those fiber
optic cables, but we gas block them because that's the way we do
it. Conservatism is perhaps our most important product.
Carothers: Well, coax cables used to leak gases to the surface.
Gases were forced a long way through them - - a thousand feet or
more. You look at the cable, and you wonder how you could
possibly push gas through it, but there is plenty of evidence that it
happens.
House: The factory gas-blocked coax works very, very well. I
don't have any numbers in my head about failure rate, but it is very
low. Coax is good stuff. In terms of our field, or discrete, gas blocks
that are installed in the multi-conductor cables, both Laboratories'
cable gas blocks work very well. They're not a problem.
Carothers: Who makes the discrete gas blocks Livermore uses?

Roth: They're made on site. That process was developed over

the years. The weather coating is stripped off and the outer jacket
it cut down to the electrical conductors. That section of the cable
is placed in a plastic mold, and an epoxy material is pumped into that
mold from one end, and out the other. That epoxy material hardens
and encapsulates the conductors and the shielding material.
Page: There are specifications as to how it's done, what the
materials are, and what the criteria are for a good gas block. That
process is managed by the construction engineering people. The
containment people specify where they go, and have the responsi-
bility for seeing that they're in the right place with respect to the
formation and the location of the plugs.
Carothers: If you look at the containment history, before
Baneberry lots of the shots seeped material through the cables, or
through the stemming. Since Baneberry, that just doesn't happen
anymore. I think that is a tribute to the people in the field who
concern themselves with the stemming, and the cables, and the gas
blocks, and so on. People from the Laboratories come to the CEP
and say, "Well, we're going to use these gas blocks and this
stemming," and the CEP people say, "Oh, fine, that's good."
Making those statements good really depends on somebody
out there in the dust and the gravel and the sun, or the rain and the
wind doing that stuff right. And the record is that they haven't
missed once, on lots and lots of shots, and on thousands of cables.
A whole bunch of hot, dusty, sweaty, or maybe wet, cold people
deserve a pat on the back for that.
Roth: Yes. For a number of years we did that discrete gas
blocking right out in the cable ways, in whatever the weather was,
and built tents over the stations. In the present day, as much as
possible we try to do that back in the cable yard, under a more
controlled environment, and with better conditions. What that
means is pre-cutting cables, and pre-Iocating those gas blocks so
they fall in the plugs in the right places, and that works out very well.
That alleviates some of the labor involved in discrete gas blocking,
but it's still not a trivial kind of task. As much as possible we try to
do it away from the shot area, but there are still occasionally late-
time requirements where it has to be done out in the field.
Carothers: Byron, "out in the field" for DNA is in a tunnel.

What's your experience with leaks from cables? Is it an easier
problem?
Ristvet: I like to point with pride that, with the exception of
Diamond Fortune, which I predicted would probably seep into the
tunnel through the medium at late times, we've not had one atom
into the tunnel on anything I designed. That's in part because I
changed our gas blocking schemes on the cables. I think the cables
were allowing gas to get a long way down the stemming column.
With a low yield you just don't smash the cables hard enough to
prevent them from being a pathway. We know we get communica-
tion through the stemming itself to the FAC. And then we have all
the cables wide open, because when the FAC detonates, it just cut
all those cables. We saw that on reentry. So now all the multi-
conductor firing cables are sitting there wide open, and they go all
the way back to the TAPS area and near the end of stemming. And
you know how it is with radioactive gas; if there's any possible
pathway, it will find it.
Carothers: A thing that is a little surprising is to calculate the
volume of that radioactive gas that's bothering you so much. It's
a few cubic centimeters, or even less.
Ristvet: I'll give you a good example. On Disko Elm we had
to describe to the Admiral, the Secretary of Energy himself, that we
did not have a major containment failure. We saw activity that came
down via the cables, then back into the LOS pipe on the wrong side
of the gas blocks. How much was it? It was four curies, maximum,
of zenon and a little bit of krypton 85. It was almost all zenon, and
the volume turned out to be nine microliters. That is a very small
amount.
Carothers: Aren't you proud of those people who develop the
monitoring instruments? They sure do a good job, don't they?
Ristvet: They are fantastic. They have to use cyrogenic traps
to actually collect it, and pump millions of cubic meters of air
through the traps, but they can get it.
Carothers: And they can measure how much there is.
Ristvet: That's exactly correct. And every time they measure
a little bit better the standard goes down.
Disko Elm was the last time we saw anything flow down the
pipe, and that's when we realized — in fact 1 caught it in the middle
of Distant Zenith — that we weren't separating our cables like we
used to. We were using predominately Livermore devices, and
Livermore likes to use this four conductor Number 2 for the firing
cables. That is an unbelievable leaker, because not only does the
jacket have lots of holes in it, but it is a stranded cable. It's a great
power cable, and of course, that's exactly what it's used for — for
charging up the x-units. But we tested it, and 1 think the permeabil-
ity was two or three darcies over a hundred foot length. So, you
could imagine it's just a conduit. But, it works real well once you
separate the strands. You do that and you cut it down at least into
the millidarcy range. You don't even have to take the insulation off.
Carothers: There used to be some people at the Livermore
Laboratory who were very touchy about their firing cables, because
they had some experiences they didn't like very much. I'm
surprised they let you mess with their firing cables.
Ristvet: Well, I talked it over at length with Mr. Ray Peabody
et al, who do Livermore's firing, and Ray and Mike Bockas stood and
watched every step that was done. And they were there even when
we did the same thing on other shots in the same way. When we did
it on the Los Alamos device, Everett Holmes and crew stood there
and just watched everything that was done, and assured themselves
that everything would be okay.
Carothers: It's called attention to detail. Joe LaComb would
have smiled and nodded approvingly.
Ristvet: That's certainly right. I can understand the sensitivity.
I can remember one DNA shot where we were down to the last set
of firing cables because we had a little water getting into the RTV
boxes. And the thought of retrieving a live nuclear device on a
reentry does not appeal to me. We've thought about it many times
though, and we actually have a contingency plan for such.
Plugs
Page: Was coal-tar epoxy the first material Livermore used for
plugs?
Carothers: They used concrete plugs on a few shots, but they
weren't very enthusiastic about those after they lost the cables on
Duryea because somebody forgot about the exotherm when the
concrete set up. The cable insulation softened, or melted, and all
the cables shorted out. Including the firing cables. It's actually
quite embarrassing not to be able to communicate with the device.
A lot of people get very upset about that.
Page: That would be a Test Director's nightmare.
Roth: Emplacing the coal-tar epoxy mix was an attempt to
solve the exotherm problem you can have with concrete, and still
get a rapidly setting up plug. A n d , it was an attempt to get a tighter
seal. A l l those kinds of things drove the development of that
material.
Carothers: I've never talked to a person who liked coal-tar
epoxy plugs.
Roth: They were smelly, they were carcinogenic, and they
were messy. If you got some of that stuff on you, you couldn't get
it off. It was gooey, sloppy stuff that ruined your clothing, and it
was difficult to put in place, but for years we did that.
Page: It was miserable stuff. It was just terrible stuff to deal
with, to be in direct contact with. It was put together in transit
trucks, and it was difficult to control the mix. The coal-tar was just
dumped in the hole, along with the gavel, and you were never
certain where the coal-tar and the gravel ended up. We made some
of those plugs in surface casings, and when we pulled them out, cut
them apart and looked at them, the uniformity through the plug
never did look good to me. I think they just depended on the fact
that there was a lot of it there to give something that was going to
do the job. I think we did ourselves a big favor when we got rid of
that.
Carothers: There were several components to those plugs; the

coal-tar, the epoxy, the hardener, and all that had to be mixed
together.
Page: That's right. In fact, we usually had a chemist, Phil
Fleming, be there when we were putting those plugs in. That's more
precision work than you ought to have in the field. Another thing
that people have said is that the coal-tar was a carcinogenic
substance, and people working with it were required to wear
protective clothing - - lab coats and gloves and boots.
Roth: When the gravel and the coal-tar got down there, there
was a tendency for the gravel to settle out, and maybe the coal-tar
epox/ flowed a little bit. Hopefully it flowed into the interstices of
the gravel, but maybe the gravel built up preferentially on one side
of the hole. We couldn't know that, but the plugs were thick enough
that we thought we had adequate containment.
Carothers: After the coal-tar epoxy plugs Livermore went to
two-part epoxy plugs for a while. Los Alamos still uses them. What
did you think about those plugs? Why did you give them up?
Page: I don't remember much about that stuff, but I don't
think it was a whole lot different from the coal-tar, myself. Take the
requirements on quality control. Here we had two different
products that came in from different vendors. Both had to be stored
properly, and we built a special facility for them. You always
worried about running out of one or the other material at a bad time.
And, it had to be blended properly, and it had to get to the hole in
a timely manner, because it came from the mixing plant, near the
shaker plant, which is a ways away. It might have been a little better
product than the CTE in terms of uniformity in the kind of plug it
produced, but it still was a difficult thing to work with.
Roth: So, a few years ago we went to the sanded gypsum plugs.
That's a cement, sand, and gypsum mixture that has good qualities
with respect to expansion or shrinkage. It's mixed on the surface,
so we know it's a homogeneous mixture, and when it gets down in
the hole it flows very well. Its qualities are such that it can be
emplaced without an exotherm that is higher than the cables or
experiments close to it can stand, and in special circumstances we
can mix it with chilled water. A big attribute of the sanded gypsum
for a Test Director is that we don't have to wait for it to set up. We
can put it in the hole, and within a half hour to forty-five minutes
it's hard, and we're ready to continue stemming. By the time you
get the pipe extracted and the equipment cleaned up it's hard, and
we can continue the stemming operation. From a cost standpoint
it's a fairly expensive material, but so was the coal-tar epoxy.
Carothers: What makes it expensive?
Roth: I'm not sure. Perhaps the gypsum. The equipment to
mix it and pump it not commonly used. It's not a transit mix truck.
It's a batch mixing operation where they pneumatically blow the
gypsum into a mixture of water and sand, and tumble that.
Eventually it gets pumped out, over to the hole and down a tremmi
pipe. We've had cameras down there, and it comes squirting out
quite violently down at the bottom. It's a good material, but it is
expensive compared to concrete.
Page: It seems to form a nice product, and when it's set it's got
a strength of about 3000 psi. And we think it's fairly compliant
when it's hit with high ground motion.
The Role of the Containment Groups
Carothers: )ack, how much authority does your containment

team have with respect to their event?
House: When I assign the containment scientist the responsi-
bility for an event it also includes a team of- - and it may be a mix,
or one person might be wearing two hats - - typically a geologist, a
geophysicist, and a phenomenologist. If you take the Icecap event,
for example, Nancy Marusak was the containment scientist, and she
was also the geologist. Mark Mathews was the geophysicist, and
Tom Kunkle did the phenomenology work. That was the event team
for that particular activity.
Once the containment scientist has the assignment, she and her
team have the responsibility, and the authority, to do the event
design. Now I, as part of the team as a sort of ex-officio member,
have the purview to look over their shoulders, as it were. When we
go to a peer review of the containment design, the principals in the
containment program at our Laboratory that we consider as prima-

rily the containment scientists, and the two CEP members, have
every right and privilege to take pot shots at it and pick it apart.
Carothers: Can the containment scientist specify what logs she
wants? Can she have them rerun if she doesn't like the quality of
the ones she gets?
House: You betcha. She also negotiates if necessary with the
field operations, the J-6 guys, if they want to reposition a plug so
it fits a particular harness connection scheme; they work that out
together. The event team is pretty much autonomous; they
certainly have the responsibility and the authority to get or take
what is needed to successfully design and/or complete the event.
Carothers: Do they specify the locations of the plugs and the
plug materials?
House: They do locate the plugs. The plug material, if we are
considering the rigid plugs, would be the grout and the two-part
epoxy. For instance, again considering Icecap, we had three rigid
plugs. One of them was HPNS-5 grout, or Husky Pup Neat Slurry,
and two of them were two-part epoxy. We worked hand in glove
with the field operations people, J-6, in getting this new to us HPNS-
5 mix. It was designed for Los Alamos by the Waterways Experi-
ment Station folks, who are the grout experts.
Carothers: What else does the containment scientist have to
do?
House: Well, containment is his or her total responsibility.
Once the site is selected, then next thing we have to produce is what
we call the containment criteria memo. That defines the plug
locations, the types of plugs and material, and of course the working
point depth, or depths if it happens to be a multiple, where the
radiation and pressure monitors, typically known as RAMS, will go,
and how many there will be. The only thing the containment
scientist does not specify with regard to the down hole stemming
plan is the amount of magnetite. That is defined by the experi-
menter. We, so to speak, take it from there.
We have recently been required to, essentially, develop stem-
ming plans for underneath the device. We at Los Alamos in
particular have had holes that were deep enough to require that.
There was one in Area 3 for a shot called Laredo, which was deep
enough that it actually intersected the Paleozoic rocks. The

environmental folks have come on the scene and said, "Gee, you've
got to do something about that. You have a potentially preferential
path for contamination to go down hole." We said, "My gosh.
We've just thought about stuff going up. We don't care if it goes
down hole, do we?" "Well, you better start thinking about that,
because we care about it. And, we carry a pretty big club, us folks
at environmental restoration." Or the Earthworms, as they are so
fondly known. So, we have specifications for the downwards
stemming now.
Carothers: If the Livermore containment people wanted some

logs run, would they go through you?
Roth: Not normally. They have their own support at the Test
Site, and they pretty much determine what's required to carry out
the containment plan; what information is required to present to the
CEP. They would go directly and say they need a gamma log, for
example.
Carothers: These logging requirements occur certainly well in
advance of when the device gets there, don't they?
Roth: Oh yes. It may be as much as a year in advance. That
information is accumulated and analyzed by the containment scien-
tist. It is documented, and eventually there is a report, or an input
document, that is presented to the CEP for their review.
Carothers: When you start to put the system down hole, who
supervises that?
Page: Well, the Test Director owns that operation. He has a
project group that works on accomplishing it. The device systems
engineer has primary responsibility for the early part of the em-
placement - - getting the device package prepared, moved to the
hole, and inserted. The Test Director's right hand operational guy
is again a construction engineer, because he's the interface with the
contractors. We always have a plan as to how we're going to do the
work, and the implementation of that plan is generally managed
between those two engineers, with the Test Director serving in an
oversight role.
Carothers: Once upon a time, and I don't mean this in a

derogatory way to your colleagues at Los Alamos, they were putting
a device down hole and they didn't put in a cable fanout that was
called for. How can you forget a fanout? That's a big thing, and
it takes some time to do during the down hole operation.
Page: What can I say? It happens. Lack of attention to detail,
poor criteria, whatever. You hope you have enough checks and
balances so things like that don't happen. We depend on Raytheon,
for example, to keep tabs of everything that happens and everything
that goes into the hole. They're generally successful, but if they
have a bad design drawing, and the requirement is somehow missed
on that drawing, they would miss it. We're supposed to have
enough checks and balances so those things don't happen.
There are a lot of things like that, that can keep a Test Director
awake at night. There are a lot of things to worry about, because
those operations are complex operations.
Carothers: Okay, the device and the diagnostics packages are
down hole. Now you have to do the stemming. Who does the
stemming? Who says, "Okay, the gravel goes here, and there is
where the plugs go," and all that?
Page: The containment program people have the responsibility
for designing a competent stemming plan. But, you're right,
somebody has to do it, and that's an interesting situation, in a sense.
1 think the containment group has the philosophy, and I think they
have had this for a long time, that they need to maintain a presence
at the hole during that operation to assure that the job has been
done right. Now, there's been a lot of discussion that it is a field
operation, and the construction engineer can do that job just fine.
I could argue that one either way, but in my opinion the way that
it is done these days is through oversight by the containment
engineering group. The actual operation is directed by the con-
struction engineer, but the presence of the containment engineer is
the element that assures that the containment packages are installed
properly. That's the way I see it.
There is another element that supports doing the stemming
right. That is the Raytheon Services Nevada role. Their job is
inspection and verification. They're given a very detailed design
package that includes all of the specifications for all of the features
that are supposed to go into the hole. There is a gravel specification,

there's moisture criteria. There are a lot of elevation features they
keep track of, such as where the fanouts are, where the gas blocks
are, where the bottom gas block is, where the top gas block is in each
fanout, where the elevations stop when you change materials, where
the bottom of the plug is, where the top of the plug is. All those
features are called out. Many of them are measured at the hole, and
RSN rigorously tracks all that information as it's established. They
essentially establish an as-built data package for the hole. We
depend on that quite a bit for establishing our confidence, once the
thing is done, that we have a competent containment package.
Carothers: When a hole is stemmed, how do you know the
stemming that's supposed to be in the hole is actually in there?
Roth: Well, first of all, there's a material balance on the
stemming that is determined. We weigh it, or volumetricaly
measure it.
Carothers: Bernie, you don't volumetricaly measure it. You
weigh it.
Roth: Okay. We weigh it. You're right. But we know what
the weight per unit volume is, and so from that point we get a
volumetric quantity. The entire depth of the hole is volumetrically
characterized ahead of time. So, within a given area wherever a
given plug is supposed to fit, or a given section of sand, or gravel,
or whatever we can calculate from the logging information what
volume of material fits in there. Then weighing that volume of
material across our weightometer instruments at the top of the hole
can pretty well determine what we put into the hole.
Carothers: How do you know the volume of the hole?
Roth: We have a down hole logging system that uses a laser to
bounce a beam off the hole wall, and records the distance to the
wall. Caliper logs were used up until a few years ago, and they still
are as a rough guide. But we now have an instrument that goes down
hole, bounces a laser beam off the adjacent surface, picks up the
reflected beam, and determines what the distance is. That beam
rotates in a full circle as the instrument is very slowly lowered or
raised in the hole, so you get a very shallow helix measurement that
determines the volume to much closer than one percent. So, we
really know what the volume of the hole is.
Carothers: One of the things that came as a surprise to

engineers, physicists, whoever, in the 1961, '62 time frame was
how hard it was to pour stemming material down the hole and not
have it bridge. It seemed incredible that you could have a four, or
six, or eight foot diameter hole and the material would bridge in it.
How could that be? But it did, and when the stemming slumped it
sometimes broke the cables. Do you ever have any difficulty of that
sort these days?
Roth: I have heard of those kinds of problems, but since I've
been the Test Director I have had neither sloughing or bridging
problems. Those were problems early on that people were surprised
about. I think that maybe the moisture contents of the sand or
gravel would let it build up on pipe strings, so it would tend to
bridge. That concern was still present as late as, I think, 1978. The
Test Director at that time said we could not fill the emplacement
pipe with grout by pouring it in the top. It would never make it to
the bottom.
Carothers: 1 could believe that.
Roth: I had a hard time believing it. The pipe was 9 SC5/8 drill
stem with an 8SC1/2 inch ID, or whatever that dimension is.
Carothers: Don't you grout that emplacement pipe from the
bottom up? That is, pump the grout down through a pipe near the
bottom and force it up the pipe?
Roth: No. But yes, we did that for years, but not anymore.
My concern was a safety concern. We were stabbing a tremmi pipe
down the emplacement pipe just to do that fill operation. First of
all, it was time consuming. Second of all, if one or more lengths of
that tremmi pipe ever got loose, it had a rifle barrel right down to
the top of the canister. I could see a real catastrophe occurring, and
that was an ongoing concern, especially watching some of the crafts
handling those tremmi pipes. It never happened, but it was a
concern to me. These days we just put the concrete, mixed with a
bentonite solution, into the top of the hole and let it free fall.
Carothers: How do you know it's full?
Roth: Again, by material balance we know it's full. The inside
of a pipe is readily calculable, and there's not much question about
how much volume is involved. Once it is full we put a bull plug on
top of it as a precaution. That probably isn't necessary, but it gives

everybody a warm fuzzy feeling. That's what's being done today
with respect to filling the emplacement pipe.
Carothers: How about knowing that the stemming was em-
placed as it was designed to be?
Page: We make every effort to install it just as designed,
because if it meets the criteria it makes everybody's life a lot
simpler. Then you don't have to deal with deviations, and they can
be a real problem. There's a lot of motivation to put the stemming
in just as the stemming plan specifies.
Carothers: I do believe that. So, the hole is stemmed, and the
plugs are in. At that point your job is about done isn't it?
Page: Getting close. There's another couple of days of
worrying about final dry runs, and analyzing the containment
records and the containment plan. One of the final jobs of the Test
Director is to present the as-built stemming plan to the Test
Controller's panel. That's done on D minus 1.
Carothers: Yes, and that's when an event called Galena came
to a halt. As I recall, there was considerable to-do over the
possibility that there was a thirty foot or so void in the stemming on
Galena. How could that be, ]im? Why couldn't you convince
people that wasn't the case?
Page: Well, I was the Test Director for Galena, and we had a
number of different kinds of information that we had to try and
interpret. We had stemming switches, we had a measure of the
quantity of material we put in the hole, and we had strain gauges on
the pipe at the surface, and above and below the canister. So, there
was a lot of different intelligence, and when it was all analyzed
through a rational process, you could arrive at some conclusions.
We became aware that we had a problem over the couple of
days that we were stemming one part of the hole. We had strain
gauge readings that changed over a weekend, after we had passed
that point in the stemming. We had other changes that indicated the
material was moving around. We alerted the Los Alamos containment
community, and gave them the information we had. We told the
Test Controller we had this concern, but that we were proceeding
to complete the stemming. As people thought about it, and did
'i
their own analyzing, Los Alamos asked for a more formal review of
the issue. As that started to come into place we decided we
wouldn't proceed until the Panel was notified. The approach was
to poll the Panel without pulling them together, but people weren't
comfortable with that, and it was decided that wasn't sufficient, so
a Panel meeting was called.
That was how it went. There were independent looks at the
data. People relying on their own experience, and making their own
interpretations, felt there was enough uncertainty that we couldn't
go ahead without a formal review. We're still totally satisfied that
we did not have a void there.
Carothers: Sure. But the important thing, for the Panel, was
you couldn't prove it one way or the other. And so people on the
Panel then said, "Well, in that case we have to assume that void is
there."
Page: I can't argue with that. 1 think that's a reasonable
attitude. Now, you'd like to be able to say that you have absolute
certainty of what's going on a thousand feet underground, but we
can't always do that.
Carothers: There was a Panel meeting on a Saturday afternoon
in Las Vegas, and after hearing what was presented, the Panel felt
the shot could go ahead. So, you fired it, and it performed just fine,
as far as the containment aspects were concerned.
Page: It did. Radiation didn't get high in the hole at all.
Carothers: Neither Laboratory has done a line-of-sightshot for
a long time. If one were needed it would be like starting all over,
wouldn't it?
Page: I don't know where we stand with regards to being able
operationally to do one of those, but we recently did re-certify our
HE closure design. About four years ago we thought we were going
to do a shot like that, and we knew there would be a large line of
sight. So we rejuvenated an old technology, where we drew from
the old design drawings that we had available, and from the
experience of people who had been there. I was one of the people
who had been in on the early development of that system back in
the late sixties and early seventies. We were able to rebuild the
machine, and we did one test, with new people. They were all new
people doing the work, and they demonstrated that it closed very
nicely. There was a situation where twenty years had passed, and
we had not lost the technology.
C arothers: It gives you to think though.
Page: O h , you bet it does. But now there's a bridge for another
ten years, perhaps. If ten years from now somebody wanted to
develop one of those, we have three or four young people who, if
they're still at the Lab, could do it then. I'll be long gone, but those
people might still be around.
Carothers: One thing that I think has been true at both
Laboratories - - I will leave DNA out because they have a different
set of problems in that they have to protect millions of dollars worth
of samples - - is that there is inherently a kind of conflict of interest
between the containment people and the field people. Your job as
the Test Director would be easier, and the shot quicker and cheaper
to do, if you didn't have to do all the logging, and special stemming,
and put in cable gas blocks, and so on.
Scolman: I think one way of looking at it is, going under-
ground, particularly with the containment criteria we've got now,
puts a buy-in cost, a base cost on any shot that is so high that what
you do on the shot does not appreciably effect the cost of the shot.
In other words, the difference in cost between a very minimal test
and a very maximal test is certainly not as much as it would have
been if it wasn't for the containment.
Carothers: I've heard the argument put the other way - - that
the shots are so complicated and expensive today that what you do
for containment is only a small part of the cost.
Scolman: In some sense, if what you count as costs for
containment is what is necessary to run an event through the CEP,
and the additional containment hardware you put in, that may be
true.
But, first off, there's the fact that you do, indeed, need to drill
holes, which requires the maintenance of a drilling < ai.ublV'-y both
for the emplacement holes and the post-shot ^ m p ' i n e . . You do,
indeed, need to have plants that generate the kind of stemming
material you use. You do, indeed, need to do all the logging and
those kind of things.
Then you put in the cost of just maintaining the Test Site — the
EPA, the weather service, all of these people who are there
regardless of how complex the event is.
Carothers: Yes, but you can't fairly charge that against
containment. Those people would be there if you were doing
atmospheric shots.
Scolman: Well, that's true.
Carothers: After Baneberry life for you as the Test Director
must have changed. You had a lot of other things that you now had
to do to prepare a shot, and fire a shot.
Scolman: Yes, of course. The TEP was never a particular
problem. One didn't worry about getting shots through the TEP;
one worried mightily about getting shots through the CEP. The
other thing was that the operational requirements that came after
Baneberry were much, much different than they were before. We
used to draw a line between Area 4 and 9. If it was a Livermore shot
we just cleared above that line. If it was a Los Alamos shot we
cleared below that. Now we clear the whole forward area on every
shot.
And there was a push made, largely driven by NVO, which
said, "Okay, let's get everything out of the forward area that we
don't need to have there." The reconfiguration studies that were
done really didn't lead to an awful lot other than we moved some
things that had been out in the forward area back into Frenchmen
Flat. Some of those changes, which in general increased costs, were
not necessarily involved directly with containment, but more with
how one reacted if you had a containment problem when you fired.
One of the things on Baneberry that got people's attention, other
than the fact that it vented and got off-site, was the fact that we did,
indeed, contaminate some people and some facilities. A lot of
changes were made to prevent that from happening again.
Brownlee: There's always been a curse, here at Los Alamos,
that I haven't quite known how to fight. It has been a very insidious
thing, because down through the years, after Baneberry, we never
had another failure. And worse than that, we didn't even have a
seep. So there has been the attitude, "Why should we do anything
different than we've been doing? We had those experiences, we did
these things, and since then we've never had a single problem of any
kind. Why then do we need these people working in containment?

Let's just keep doing everything the way we're doing it, and get rid
of all of those people."
And that attitude is still around. The idea is that we only need
one person now, we don't need five or the six. We don't need any
containment research now, because everything is doing all right.
It's easy to be logical, but that doesn't win the argument. It's very
hard to make an argument that can win against that attitude.
Livermore, meanwhile, had two episodes, and that helped, because
we'd say, "There are still things we don't know." And then the
DNA has had things happen, and that helps, but then the argument
is, "Why should we hire people to work on some of those things? Let
them do that. It's not any of our affair."
And it's that argument which is the real reason why we had the
same stemming plan forever, and we did our plugs the same way
forever. We never could win the argument with our local engineers
that there needed to be any change. You don't need to do it better
if what you're doing is all right. We said, "We can do it better," but
that didn't matter.
549
21
Sometimes The Dragon Wins
There have been several events where the containment design

has failed, for one reason or another. Some of these, such as Des
Moines, Eel, Pike, and Bandicoot have been mentioned in earlier
chapters. In the course of the interviews other events were de-
scribed by people who were personally involved with them. In many
cases, even though there may have been extensive post-shot efforts
to understand the reason or reasons for a particular failure, often
there is not agreement of a definitive cause. What follows is not an
attempt to analyze and develop an accepted scenario for these
events, nor is it a complete listing of all of the events that have had
substantial releases.
There is one point that should be mentioned. Following the
detonation of a device in a tunnel, while there may be satisfactoriy
containment of all of the radioactive products, there is often an
accumulation of gases which make it hazardous to reenter the
tunnel. Hydrogen and carbon monoxide in particular form explo-
sive mixtures in air, given suffiently high concentrations. (See the
description in Chapter Sixteen of the hydrogen explosions which
took place following the detonation of the Tamalpais device.) There
may be some level of radioactive gases in the tunnel, none of which
have leaked out to the atmosphere due to the efforts made pre-shot
to form gas-tight barriers to such leakage.
However, after the detonation reentries must be made to re-
cover the experimental samples and various equipment, and to
prepare the tunnel complex for future experiments. At a time
determined by the Test Controller, which may be several days after
the event, a ventilation system can be activated to replace the air in
the tunnel with fresh air. The hydrogen and carbon monoxide and
other inert gases can be safely dispersed into the atmosphere. Any
radioactive products are passed through filters, and the biologically
inert noble gases are released in monitored low level amounts over
a period of time. As a result of this tunnel ventilation process
detectable amounts of activity may possibly be found on-site.
For example, the Misty Rain and Mighty Oak events both were
successfully contained by the definitions in the CEP charter and the
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. No activity found its way to the atmo-
sphere following either event, but there was radioactivity in the
tunnel complex itself. During the ventilation process activity was
detected on-site, and both events are listed as having a controlled
release. This is an operational procedure that is not part of the
containment design, and does not indicate a containment failure.
G n o m e - - 12/10/61
Weart: In addition to shots like Marshmallow and Gumdrop,

another shot that helped me formulate some of my thoughts in the
early days was Gnome, in the Carlsbad area. It did have a prompt
sampling pipe on it. It also had a tunnel with a line-of-sight pipe
down it. It was reentered, and I was on that reentry team. The
observations there — the fact that the line-of-sight that went straight
up pinched off and nothing came out, even though we were trying
to get samples through it, the fact that the line-of-sight pipe that we
wanted to seal off quickly may have contributed somewhat to the
release, the fact that the buttonhook principle wasn't successful in
that particular case, and it didn't seal things off — did contribute to
some of my early thinking. And some of the early DNA designs
followed that thinking. We went along on that course until we had
a problem, and then we had to change things.
Carothers: From your observations on the Gnome reentry, to
what would you attribute the leak that occurred? You say the line-
of-sight pipe may have contributed.
Weart: Well, Gnome was in a location with a bedded stratig-
raphy, and the line-of-sight pipe went right along parallel to those
beds. The combination of the cavity growth and the line-of-sight
pipe energy caused the ground to open up preferentially, all along
the bedding planes. And that allowed energy to squirt out of the
cavity, and out into the tunnel. Whether it would have happened
if the bedding planes hadn't been there, I don't know, but it appears
to have been a plane of weakness that allowed separation to occur.
Carothers: On reentry could you see radioactivity, injected
material, along those planes?
Sometimes The Dragon Wins 551
Weart: Yes. Whether it would have gone on the same path

without a bedding plane you don't know.
So, because of that, the design for a subsequent shot there,
called Coach, which was never fired, would have avoided this
situation by having an incline going up on the buttonhook part. That
way you didn't have a plane intersecting both the working point and
the tunnel. And in a lot of the rocks that we fired in subsequently,
alluvium and the tuffs, we've usually not had a bedding plane
problem to worry about.
Higgins: I and three other people reentered the shaft and
tunnel, and recovered one of the pieces of experimental hardware
about December 20, 1961. I can say with certainty that there was
no Ieakagr down the drift or the line-of-sight pipe. The gas seal door
was bypassed in a clay seam that was a foot or so above the top of
the tunnel. There was no evidence of anything except steam in the
fracture or shaft. Leakage must have come from the cavity after it
formed, through that seam, bypassing all the engineered features.
Eagle-- 12/12/63
Brownlee: I approached containment from the point of view
of containment of LOS shots, and I saw the whole thing in terms of
closing pipes with various kinds of things to keep energy from
getting out after they had made their measurements. Now, as I saw
it, the Livermore experimentalist had an upper hand to a greater
degree than they did here. And that started with AI Graves and Bill
Ogle; they were determined to allow me to try to keep things from
coming out. At Livermore, it seemed to me, closures were kind of
secondary. With Los Alamos, closures were kind of first; you had
to do that.
When Eagle came along it was for sure, I thought, going to
allow the experimenters to get their information, but there was no
way to close the pipe. I was convinced that Eagle was going to leak.
Almost by accident I told AI Graves, "1 think Eagle will come right
out. I don't think it's designed right." We had the treaty then, so
that could have been a violation of the treaty if it did that. It
bothered AI when I told him I thought it would leak. So, he called
up the Livermore Director, who was then Johnny Foster, and as a

result we had a meeting in Las Vegas. That was the summer of '63,
and Eagle was fired later that year.
I took a lot of heat, because Livermore was offended that AI
had asked them to tell him about the Eagle design. But I came home
after the meeting and did some calculations, and I was still con-
vinced that it would come out. So I have to admit I took a certain
amount of perverse pleasure when it did come out, because I had
been taking a lot of heat.
Now, I am absolutely convinced that Eagle was not fired as
designed. Los Alamos people went out and watched them put Eagle
downhole. They came back and said, "Here's how that was
assembled." I said, "It's not supposed to be that way." And so, I
think the amount of energy that came out was more than there
should have been.
The difference was this. In the very bottom of the pipe there
was to be a series of lead rings. My guys say that all those lead rings
were piled right on top of one another, like a lead collimator. I'm
absolutely convinced that there was a lead cylinder at the very place
where there should not have been a lead cylinder. The ground shock
had no way of penetrating that lead in time to close the pipe. It
squeezed off, in time, but obviously a lot of stuff went by. Of
course, it was an awkward thing because the Livermore guys didn't
dare own up that they hadn't done it right, so they assured the
system that they had done it exactly as drawn. But the Los Alamos
people at the Test Site, who lived there, said, "Those lead baffles
were put cheek to jowl." And there were a lot of them, so there was
just a big lead cylinder.
We had thought about Iine-of-sight pipes for some time, but I
regarded Eagle as the first modern LOS shot because it was the first
LOS shot with the treaty in place. There had been the argument,
"Let the energy pass and then close the pipe." Now, that's right,
in the sense that the Eagle fireball didn't have any radioactivity in
it. Is that all right? I said, "It's not all right if it blows everything
apart."
Before Eagle, people were saying, "It won't do that." And I
was saying, "There's enough energy that it will. It should do
damage." And it did. There was more energy there than I was
expecting, but as I said, I think there was a reason for that. But after
Eagle we no longer had the debate about letting energy pass before
you closed the pipe. So, the concept of closing everything fast was
solidified, reinforced, and became doctrine after Eagle, for us.
Eagle was a big experience for us.
I think the Eagle design, if it had been emplaced right, would
almost have worked. 1 think it would have changed history if it had
been emplaced right. As it was, it looked as though the design
allowed all that energy out, and 1 don't believe that. But Eagle
heavily influenced the next designs.
Double Play-- 06/15/66

LaComb: There was radiation behind the overburden plug
within like the first second. The radiation got outside the overbur-
den plug within minutes, but it was a slow release. It wasn't
dynamic; it was throttled through about a six inch hole and about
a two inch hole. These holes were each about eight feet long, so
there was quite a bit of throttling there. And we had a very slight
seep through the ventilation valves and the gas-seal door, and a seep
up through the cable bundles.
I think we got permission to ventilate about a day or two later,
and we pumped gas reading better than a thousand R per hour out
of the tunnel complex for better than two days. That was as high
as the rams went. And that was where we were reading what was
coming out of the tunnel complex. Of course the filters, after the
first ten minutes, were a thousand R and stayed there.
We had three what were called DBS boxes, which were
supposed to fire closed. When it broke loose and came out, it hit
those boxes and the test chamber moved about forty feet towards
the portal. We were very fortunate, because the door of the
chamber ended up right beside the little tiny car-pass alcove we had.
If it hadn't, nobody would have ever been able to get in. Those DBS
boxes moved over eighty feet.
Further out there were these huge glass bubbles — just huge
bubbles, of glass. They were six feet in diameter. They weren't full
round; they were hemispheres, as a rule. I assume, because of the
prompt release, they were from molten rock from the cavity. And,
because the DBS boxes were slowing everything down there, the
melt was stagnating there, more or less, and depositing that glass.
But there was enough gas coming with the glass that it formed those
bubbles. The same kind of bubbles were seen in the tunnel on Red
Hot. It was the same kind of failure in the same time frame. So,
I think that glass must have come from the cavity.
There were also glass stalactites hanging down from the ceiling.
That glass, on the rock itself, I'm not sure whether it was where the
tunnel had been melted and dripped down in place, or whether it
was sprayed on and then dripped down.
It was kind of funny, because when we first reentered that area,
it was several R. As we walked forward, into the stemming region,
it went down to ten mR. Everything had come out so fast that area
was clean.
Door Mist-- 08/31/67

LaComb: On Door Mist, as I recall, radiation started to show
up in the tunnel in something like eleven seconds. There were two
TAPS - - tunnel and pipe seals - - in the pipe string, and two or three
DBS boxes. On reentry we found that the close-in TAPS door had
closed down about thirty degrees. It had been caught by something,
and looked like that must have been a two foot square chunk of steel,
because that door, as strong as it was, was just folded. We had put
a pile of sandbags forward of the walkway door in the close-in TAPS;
there was about a three foot space between the sandbags and the
door. That door had at least a ten inch wide flange embedded in the
concrete. We never did find the door that was in the walkway.
Apparently the sandbags had gone in motion, and they just took it
some place out of this world.
The far-out TAPS had a hole eroded above it which was about
a foot to a foot and a half high by eleven feet wide.
Carothers: ]oe, you say the walkway door was gone. It had to
be in the tunnel somewhere, right?
LaComb: Well, there's so much rubble you don't know where
anything is, and the radiation levels are such that a lot of times
you've only got five or ten or fifteen minutes to look around. If we
had spent any effort looking for that door it would have been called
"natural curiosity," and that's not of benefit to the program. I'm
sure it was in there someplace, because we didn't see any signs of
melt on Door Mist.
When we reentered from the overburden plug, just inside the

overburden plug it looked like a prehistoric monster. The steel sets
were all in place, the tie rods were still in place, but all the lagging
was gone; there wasn't even any ashes around that you could see.
All we could see going on down the tunnel was just this string of steel
sets. It looked like a skeleton. And the back of the tunnel was just
flat.
I was team chief on that reentry. We didn't have any
ventilation because the vent lines were down, so we'd take three
steps forward, stop, and say, "What's the readings?" "It's like a
hundred mR, and about five hundred ppm's CO", and so much,
maybe five percent explosive mixture. We'd take three more steps
and stop. About this time my face mask had fogged up, and I was
trying to use my hands like a windshield wiper. We got about twenty
feet forward of the plug and it went to over a thousand parts per
million CO, and over ten percent explosive mixture. Our face
masks were fogging up so fast we couldn't keep up with it. At that
time I said, "This is unsafe, guys. We will go around the other way."
Scroll - - 04/23/68
Olsen: Probably the earliest event where material properties
really made a difference to anybody was Scroll, up on Pahute, where
they were hunting for a medium that would decouple as much as
possible. So, they wanted to know the in-situ density. Well, we
found an air-fall tuff of very low density; it was 1.3 to 1.4.
Carothers: It contained?
Olsen: Well, it probably would have if we had plugged the
holes properly.
Carothers: What was wrong?
Olsen: Again, it was a lack of appreciation for the time scale
of things, and what can happen after the initial bang. We poured
some sand down the hole, and we also poured some cement in.
Except, we poured the cement in at a location where it would be
eaten up by any ordinary subsurface collapse, which is what we got.
So, because the only plug we had was eaten up by the subsurface
collapse, all the granular stemming drained out, and there was an
open hole to the surface, and lo and behold, it started leaking.
In retrospect, some of these things, in fact a lot of these things,

you think, "God, why were we so dumb? That's obvious." Well,
at the time it wasn't obvious. We didn't appreciate subsurface
collapses, we didn't really have any information, any data base, that
said that a subsurface collapse was likely to go to six cavity radii, give
or take some number. We didn't have that kind of information.
At the time of Scroll we didn't know much about what
happened on Pahute Mesa at all. We didn't have much experience
with the normal geology up there, the density two, give or take a
little, stuff that we see all the time now. Much less did we know
about one of these unusual sites that we went hunting for, for Scroll.
So, as we started to learn things, like where collapses might go to,
we started to put in things that would attack that problem.
Carothers: Well, Rainier had been fired in 1957, and it had
a subsurface collapse. There were extensive post-shot explorations
done at the Rainier site during the moratorium, having to do with,
among other things the height of the chimney, and so on.
Olsen: That is true. But it wasn't appreciated at the time we
did Scroll.
Hupmobile- - 11/18/68
Olsen: Hupmobile was a disaster. It was a vertical line-of-sight
shot, and the experimenters wanted collimators in the pipe, because
they did not want shine bouncing off the walls, so we putin
collimators at almost every pipe joint. This was a fairly Iargeline-of-
sight - - it went up to several feet in diameter at the surface. We had
these relatively massive collimator rings, and for ease of installation
they had a little, very thin metal lip around the outside. So, they
just sat on a pipe joint, and there was virtually no strength in the
thing that attached them to the pipe.
When the flow came along, going upward, and started dumping
energy on the downstream side of these things, this little rim of fairly
thin metal that was holding them in place gave way. So, these rings
went up the pipe, became a tangled mass of stuff at the top, and
blocked all of the valves. We recovered, on reentry, something like
sixteen hundred pounds of twisted up collimator rings at the top of
the line-of-sight pipe. We could even identify which collimator it
was that had been torn loose.
556a
Surface structure on Hupmobile, pre-shot.

556b
Equipment package on Hupmobile, post-shot.
fl - V - -^.- • - Z -,~ V- *'• v -r--i

[•ZVtr/T- ,.-.—rt- , .- -. —j
Surface structure on Hupmobile, post-shot.

There was a transient ground shock closure at the bottom, and

it took like twenty-five seconds or so for the cavity to find the weak
spot and erode it enough that it really blew its cork. There was a
good sized cloud, but the flow was going through the pipe, so it
didn't erode as much dirt and dust as Baneberry. The release was
smaller than on Baneberry, but I think it was within an order of
magnitude. It was big.
We had a large, several story exposure station at surface
ground zero, on top of the pipe, and because of the venting that
large exposure station caught fire, and we lost a large share of all the
things that were in it. The experimenters didn't like that at all.
Baneberry - - 12/18/70
Weart: I have a little trouble recalling the exact time people
started to look for more favorable geology for the tunnel shots.
Certainly a marked turning point within the entire community,
recognizing the influence of geology and so forth, was with the
Baneberry event.
Carothers: You were part of the investigating committee.
Looking back on it, what is your view of the understanding that was
reached at that time, which may still be the right one?
Weart: As I recall, there were a couple of circumstances which
we felt contributed to the Baneberry release. One was the fact that
whereas events of this particular yield were normally detonated in
alluvium, in unsaturated rock where we had come to expect a certain
phenomena, Baneberry was detonated in saturated clay. There was
a very high water content, and much more effective coupling of
energy into ground motion.
That simply wasn't anticipated. In one simplistic way of
looking at it, with that equivalent seismic energy it looked like a
much bigger event. And therefore by our criteria, which were
empirical, of course, itwasunderburied. I think the water may have
contributed in another sense in that it provided an immense
reservoir, a far greater reservoir than usual of not easily condensable
gases. That left the cavity at a very high pressure for a very long
time. And the third circumstance was a fault, through which the
eventual release occurred, which intersected an interval under-

ground which saw these high pressures. It took a long time; it was
three minutes or so before the release started.
So, it may have been that a combination of all of those things
were necessary, and that any one of them, by itself, would not have
caused trouble. You don't know, of course, in retrospect, but 1
think all three of those things contributed to the Baneberry release.
Carothers: And that focused attention on the geology.
* Weart: Yes, it did. There was the fault, there was the
unanticipated degree of saturation, the moisture, and the clay.
People thought that if we had been smart enough, and had looked
for these things, we might have anticipated that there could be a
problem. So, maybe we ought to start looking for those things in
the future.
Hudson: The primary problem with Baneberry, we think, had
to do with geology. I say we think, because there is still not a
complete agreement as to what caused the Baneberry release. And
we had not given as much attention to what I should almost call civil
engineering, prior to Baneberry, as we have afterwards.
Carothers: What do you mean by civil engineering?
Hudson: Engineering design based on the strengths of the
overburden. Behavior of the overburden. We had basically relied
on the density of the overburden in the past. And built into that
density was all the features that led to successful containment of past
events, that we had been ignoring. Such as strength. Clearly, while
you may have the proper overburden density in a fluid, it's pretty
easy to imagine how some of the device material could get to the
surface.
In the case of Baneberry we were almost in a fluid, in that the
working point was in a saturated clay zone. We were still operating
almost entirely from experience. We didn't really know what to
expect from the saturated clay. And, we really didn't know that we
were in saturated clay. All we knew was that they were having
trouble constructing the hole, a lot of trouble drilling.
But as far as the other parameters were concerned, it appeared
to be a good high impedance medium, which would cause the pipe
to close, and it seemed to be favorable for containment. At the
same time, there were some of us who had questions we would have
liked to have had answered before Baneberry, but I don't think any
of us who had questions really had reason for believing it was going
to vent. We just had unanswered questions we would like to have
had answered before Baneberry. Had we answered all those
questions, it's not clear whether we had enough understanding of
containment at that time to have avoided Baneberry.
Carothers: It's my understanding that it did not vent through
the Iine-of-sight pipe. That closed off.
Hudson: That's true. I think the pipe had little or nothing to
do with the venting on Baneberry. The overburden structure was
too weak to contain the event. As a result, as the cavity grew,
probably fissures were formed close-in and hot steam entered the
fissures, and pushed them outward. And it found the easiest path
to the surface and came out through a crack, known now as the
Baneberry fault. My personal opinion is that had that fault not been
there, it would still have come out through the path of least
resistance. It might have been a crack some place that wasn't
associated with the fault, but I believe it still would have come out.
The conditions that you needed to not have a hydrofracture
out of the cavity just weren't there on Baneberry. You need some
strength to keep hydrofractures from occurring, and apparently on
Baneberry we didn't have that, so gases came to the surface.
Another reason why I think it is related to hydrofracture is because
it took three and a half minutes. If it had been something really
prompt, associated with the Iine-of-sight pipe, it probably would
have been at the surface in well under a minute. I think we stepped
into Baneberry largely due to our ignorance.
Rambo: There were a lot of calculations that were done after
Baneberry, using 1-D calculations. They were not successful. In
going back and looking at this residual stress field again, those
calculations seemed to show a residual stress field. I think the one
person who came closest to having some success, using 1 -D codes,
was Norton Rimer, from S-Cubed. He alluded to weak clay at the
shot point as being a possibile reason.
Things kind of got left that way for a number of years. In the
meantime, we were developing, with Don Burton, who was the code
physicist, much easier ways of working with this 2-D code called
TENSOR. For instance, we found that instead of having to zone
v- • i% w *&
everything as constant squares for different layers for different

angles, and then try to fit it together, which was almost impossible,
we could pull all the zones into a straight line, so we could then put
our material models in without having to do it by hand. We could
do that with a computer code. And so, what we call constraint lines,
in the business I'm in, were put into this code.
As the codes improved, I thought we could go back and do a
2-D calculation of Baneberry. So, we went into the business of
assembling this Baneberry calculation. There were certain features
that we looked at and said, "Oh my gosh, we ought to put this in,
or we ought to put that in." There had been a lot of exploratory
work done on Baneberry, after the shot, to pull out properties that
hadn't been measured before the shot, because that was not what
we did in those days.
One of the things I identified in that calculation was the fact
that there was a saturated layer up to a certain surface, and we had
to put that in. Above that layer the material becomes very porous.
And, we did measure strengths, so we ought to put this weaker
material in and a higher strength material around it. The geologists
gave us a picture of what it looked like in cross section, and there
was a big fault going off to the side, and there was a Paleozoic hard
rock scarp off at a certain distance. We put all this together.
Some of the work I had done on the slifer data on Baneberry
indicated to me that it was very weak material, down in the working
point region. What I had developed over the years was a way of
looking back and getting a rough estimate of what the intercept of
the particle velocity was, and if it's down close to zero, i made the
assumption that it's very weak rock. If there's a high intercept, then
maybe it's a stronger rock. Well, Baneberry just went right through
zero. It just looked like a fluid. If you were to shoot in a fluid, the
intercept of this curve would be down at zero. Baneberry looked like
that, when I backed out from the data. I tried to back out some
material properties, but we eventually went to a model developed
by Ted Butkovich for putting this together. The strength curves we
used came from rock measurements in the laboratory.
We ran the first calculation, and essentially it showed the whole

thing going belly up, in terms of a residual stress field. It happened
on the first try. We were shocked, because we had not had any
success with the 1-D calculations, but the 2-D calculations showed
this effect right away.
Probably I have a different view point from most people on that
shot. There is a layer of saturated tuff above the shot, and above
that there is a very porous layer, and so there was this strong wave-
flattening effect, what I call a focusing effect, that happened when
the shock wave went from the saturated tuff into the porous
alluvium. So, we saw what I called a focused event.
That was an important learning point in calculations, I felt - -
that you could get this kind of enhanced ground motion. We had
looked at Tybo before we had looked at Baneberry, and so when I
saw this saturated layer I felt that it was going to cause a lot of things
to go on in the calculation that might not normally happen. And
indeed, we saw this effect in the Baneberry calculation.
One thing that was interesting about Baneberry was that the
fault was right at the edge of this wet, saturated area. There was a
pocket of saturation that did not go flat across the fault. It stopped
at the fault, according to what the geologists told us. That particular
geometry was important to what we saw. The wave going out caused
a lot of ground motion going up, along one side of the fault, and
when it crossed over, the saturation was different and the motion
was less.and that tended to cause a lot of ground motion running
along one side of the fault as opposed to the other side of the fault.
That was probably an important part of the calculation, in that you
saw a lot of motion on the fault.
So you've got motion along the fault, plus an almost plane wave
rarefaction that comes back, and you get a lot of tensile failure
around the cavity in this weak material. The net result was we just
didn't end up with any residual stress, after you put all of this
together.
Carothers: To oversimplify. You've described a mechanism
where you're not going to get residual stress, and where there will
be tensile failures in a weak material. That sound like a situation
where you would expect a lot of hydrofractures.
Rambo: Sure. Plus there was a large supply of water to drive
that.
Camphor-- 06/29/71
Camphor was a line-of-sight tunnel event, sponsored by San-
dia, which was originally scheduled to be fired shortly after
Baneberry. It was delayed for some six monthes by the AEC
investigation of the Baneberry release, and was the fourth event
fired after testing was resumed with the Embudo event on June 16,
1971. In some respects its containment behavior resembled the
Mighty Oak event fired some fifteen years later. There was a release
of a small amount of gases, where Mighty Oak did not have such a
release, but there was extensive damage to all of the equipment and
experiments in the tunnel itself, and the loss of essentially all of the
tunnel complex due to the fact that there was direct communication
from the cavity to the various drifts. Jerry Kennedy, from Sandia,
was the Test Director for Camphor.
Kennedy: Cypress worked perfectly well, from a containment

viewpoint. It was a storybook test from start to finish. At that time
what 1 think was going on was the DNA events were quite frequent,
as compared to now in these later years. So shots were happening
numerous times a year, and they were big effects tests, and they
were being very successfully contained. Clearly the containment
plans were working. So, everybody said, "A piece of cake." I think
that was a little of the attitude, but that's not saying people were
being slip-shod about it.
Then, roughly two years after Cypress, along came Camphor.
The containment and stemming plan changed from Cypress. I'd say
it was, maybe, more daring. We were going to use less stemming,
because we had convinced ourselves we didn't need as much as on
Cypress. These DNA shots had happened, and so it must be okay.
You could follow the logic that said it was well designed. We
certainly did that. Of course, it did not contain. We didn't have
a venting to the outside, but it was a complete disaster inside the
tunnel.
We had a couple of big overburden plugs, and after the shot we
finally decided that there was a little bit of geology that perhaps we
didn't quite understand, around the forward overburden plug,
which was at the aft end of the line-of-sight pipe. The other was out
at the main gas seal closure. That was a big, keyed-in concrete plug,
which was designed to hold overburden pressure, and so on. As
near as we could ever tell, a leak formed around the outside of the
close-in plug, through a crack we were unaware of, went around the
plug, and then it quickly eroded into the LOS drift, and then the
work drift.
The LOS pipe was rolled it into a ball at the forward overbur-
den plug, into a space of about two to three hundred feet long. That
was originally over a thousand foot string of pipe. It was all fairly
compacted right up against that overburden plug. You just don't
really realize from calculations and numbers how much energy there
is there, and what it can do to things. You have to see what happens.
The flow didn't go through the gas seal plug in the main pipe
drift, at the aft end where the diagnostics were. It went across into
the parallel work drift, and then went through the plug over there.
That plug had all the cables in it; all the instrumentation cables went
through it. The eventual hole, which I walked back through on
reentry, was through that area where the cables went through. It
was clean as a whistle. It took all those cables out.
The gas seal door was the final thing between us and the great
out-of-doors. It was a swing-shut door which you closed on button
up. It was just a big steel swinging door with big seals. It was
supposed to be speced at a thousand psi and a thousand degrees.
We tried to test that door for leaks. It was all in a big, grouted
bulkhead, and we worried about leaks in that thing. It had been
there for a long time, because it wasn't a one shot thing. That was
there for all time. We worried about leaks in that, and in the course
of preparation we had closed that door I don't know how many
times. At night on the late shift, when people didn't need to be in
and out of tunnel, we closed that thing, sealed it, and then we would
pressurize the inside with big blowers and compressors. Then we
would check for leaks all over that face. We did it with little squirt
guns with soap bubbles. And it leaked. We pressure grouted that
plug, and did it I don't know how many times. We thought we were
probably wasting a lot of money, because it was a massive effort, but
I think it saved our bacon in the end.
Inside that door we measured the temperatures and pressures,
and it was pretty clear we had a bad environment right at the door.
Later you could see the cables that were inside by that gas seal door,
and the insulation was hanging down in festoons. It was really the
last barrier, but it held.
Carothers: My recollection is that there was a seepage of a few

hundred curies of gas, but there was no venting, and no particulates.
Kennedy: That's right. It took about one minute for it to cut
loose. At plus thirty seconds, in the control room, we were patting
each other on the back. There had been a perfect, flawless count-
down through zero time. Everything turned on the way it was
supposed to, and it was ideal technically, from the data standpoint.
Everybody was really beginning to feel wonderful.
Then I got a call at plus one minute and they started giving me
RAMS readings. "RAMS reading inside the overburden plug is
greater than 10,000R." That meant the meter was pegged, and
they didn't know what it was. Well, the one by the LOS pipe you
would expect to go very high, because it was in a high shine area.
And then they said the same thing inside the other overburden plug,
in the work drift. And then at the gas seal door. When they said
that I had this terrible sinking feeling. That's when we all turned as
one and looked at the CCTV picture of the portal, just waiting to
see it belch fire, or whatever.
Carothers: And after about plus one minute or maybe two,
probably everybody looked at you and said, "Well, you're the Test
Director. What are we gonna do, Jerry?"
Kennedy: I remember quite well what happened. I was in the
control room, and we had a hot line to the Test Controller's table.
A guy handed me that phone, and said, "They want to talk to you,"
and it was Byron Murphy. He was the Scientific Advisor for the
event, and he was sitting down there with Bob Thalgott, who was the
Test Controller. He said, "Jerry, I know you're going to be a little
busy up there, but do you think you might be able to stop down and
see Bob and I?" I said, "Yes sir, I think I can." I remember walking
down the hall to the War Room, like I was on stilts — kind of in a
shocked feeling. It was a bleak day.
Carothers: You did reenter?
Kennedy: Yes, after a long while. I can't tell you the date right
now, but it was many moons later. Of course, right at first it was
hotter than heck. The tunnel was hot all the way out to the gas seal
door, so the whole tunnel complex was contaminated. To get back
to the drift where the pipe was we mined parallel drifts all the way
back, because we couldn't go through the old way - - it was too hot,
and too difficult to decon, so we mined new drifts.
Carothers: That wasn't just a gas leak in the tunnel. It sounds
as though that tunnel was in direct communication with the cavity,
and that there was device debris all over the place.
Kennedy: Oh yes. It was very bad. We parallel mined all the
way back in, parallel to the pipe drift itself, and made cross cut
entries at interesting points into the drift. In some places we
couldn't go still, so we would just put a hole in so we could insert
some intrumentation and look around. Some drifts we crossed in
the reentry mining we had to stem because they were rather hot
areas. There were places where you couldn't stop and look around.
In 5 R fields you don't loiter, and we didn't.
Carothers: You had the overburden plugs, and the gas seal
door. Did you have any closure hardware on the pipe?
Kennedy: Other than the front end we had a thing called a
dimple machine up front, which was to cut off flow in the LOS pipe
close in. We had some experiment recovery packages that we hoped
we would be able to mine in and pick up and take out, which we did
do. Then farther out we had our fast gate, and then one of those
gravity fall doors as a backup, the way that DNA did it.
Mighty Oak- - 04/10/86

Carothers: Bob, what are your thoughts about Mighty Oak?
Bass: Mighty Oak. I cannot give an official statement about
what happened on Mighty Oak. That's somebody else's province,
but I know what happened. I can tell you exactly what happened
on Mighty Oak. On Mighty Oak there was too much pipe flow,
immediately, and the MAC doors were taken out. We did not have
a FAC, the fast acting closure, so those doors were our first line of
defense.
The MAC doors came across, and we monitor how those doors
move, and where they are. Those doors came together, and they
got just about to where they overlapped, and they slowed down.
That is the time when the pipe flow gets there. Now, pipe flow is
my field. That's where I really have worked on measurements - -
what's going on in the pipe, and in the stemming material around

it. We monitor those pressures, and we know when things get down
there to the doors. We saw that the pressure got there when the
doors were just beginning to overlap. They didn't hit, but just as
they obscured the pipe, they stopped. Right at that same time, after
this happened, the pressure gauge in front of the GSAC, which is
fifty feet further down, picked up pressure.
Now, there are two flows of material to analyze. There is the
radiation blowoff, and material from the closure of the reverse cone
spool. Both of those produce material running down the pipe.
There are approximately ten kilograms of blowoff material in an
event like Mighty Oak. It moves at two to three centimeters per
microsecond, so it gets down to the MAC doors when they are are
still back, but there is hardly any pressure, because it's a very low
pressure situation. It's just a little puff often kilograms of material.
You hardly can see it.
But as the doors close, the second flow comes along, and the
second flow is the material injected by the ground shock beyond the
reverse cone, closing it down. You have water vapor from the
stemming material, you have iron vapor from the pipe, and the
pressure at that point is appoximately 200 kilobars. When that goes
on axis that takes you to megabars, so you vaporize a little iron and
everything else. That material comes down at a half centimeter per
microsecond. It gets to those doors in 1 5 milliseconds, which is
exactly when the doors meet.
Okay, something is happening here, and what I firmly believe
is, because of an error and a change in the pipe structure up around
the reverse cone, they had a much heavier pipe than usual. They
had a heavy pipe there to support the helix, and then they took the
helix out, but left the heavy pipe in. So, we have a lot of pipe now.
On two events, Misty Rain and Mighty Oak, that shrapnel followed
the early blowoff flow down, got there just as the doors were coming
together, knocked the doors out, and so the second pressure came
through. When you get to those doors there's a hole big enough that
we had 500 psi against the GSAC, which is the next closure down.
Anyway, we knocked that hole in the pipe. I am firmly
convinced that we injected some close-in iron that got down there,
and knocked a hole in the doors. With the doors knocked out early,
then you had a path for stemming flow. So, when the stemming got
there after thirty to forty milliseconds, a huge amount of stemming

went through those front doors, and that took out the next door
back, and it kept right on going. We just had a ram running down
through there, and it took everything out.
Carothers: Dan, what do you think happened on Mighty Oak?

Patch: Well, I think the focus we had on Mighty Oak was really
what we think of as material property problems, both with the site
itself, and also interacting with the design. This was one of the
designs in a series that used a taper that was larger than had been
done in the past. It used stemming that was weaker than had been
used, and the weaker sections were brought in closer. Also, if I'm
not mistaken, some of the grout formulations were twiddled toward
the weaker direction. A n d , the site itself was highly saturated; there
was very little air void.
Carothers: That's supposed to be good.
Patch: It's good if you don't overdrive the stemming, but if
you overdrive the stemming, then you can generate a lot of pipe
flow, which Bob Bass feels was a very serious problem, because it
stalled the doors. One of the things about these gates is, if they're
only partially closed, and not fully closed, their strength is very low,
because they're not fully supported. My feeling was the doors were
knocked out, and there was enough extrusion so the stemming
continued to flow.
A l l of these materials, in comparison even to water, certainly
in comparison to air, have a very high modulus. They're very stiff.
A tiny amount of flow makes a great deal of stress relief, because
the materials are almost incompressible. So, I think there was a low
state of stress down the stemming column, and flow started through
what was probably a relatively small path down through the
stemming. That built up stresses on the TAPS that caused it to fail.
The thermal stresses and the pressure loads on the TAPS were such
that it couldn't stand the load.
Carothers: In thinking about your small path I am reminded of
an interesting tape recording that was made on Camphor. You may
have heard it. When they fired Camphor, for whatever reason they
had some microphones in the tunnel. For a few seconds it's quiet,
and then there's a little hissing noise that in a few seconds builds up
to where it sounds like a train. That opening was eroded from very
small to very big very quickly.
Patch: I haven't heard that recording, but we think that's
exactly what happened - - that Mighty Oak had a relatively small
path, which was capable of supplying a credible amount of gas.
There's a fair amount of volume back there, but nothing compared
to the volume of the cavity. It wasn't really a nasty flow at first, but
once the TAPS let go, and it began to really flow through that path,
I think it just cleaned things right out of there. And also 1 think
there's a lot of evidence to suggest that's how Hybla Fair failed also
- - that the real failure of the stemming was not a prompt stemming
blowout, but from an flow that just eroded the stemming out.
I don't think that Mighty Oak was an impossible test. I think
one could successfully design for that site, and I'm not even
convinced that one couldn't use that pipe taper, and successfully
contain that shot.
Carothers: What would you change?
Patch: Well, that's a fair question. I think one of the things
Sandia has done is make the doors on those gates about four times
stronger, and they've speeded the gates up significantly. An
improvement they've done a lot of work on, and are about ready to
field, is to use a propellant, a powder charge, if you will, to drive
the doors, as opposed to gas from gas bottles. I think we could speed
the doors up enough so we'd have a better chance against them
getting stalled in the ways. I think we've got doors that are
significantly stronger, like factors of about four. Maybe that's not
enough. I don't know.
Ristvet: While I was at S-Cubed I predicted Mighty Oak would

be Mighty Oak about six months before the event.
Carothers: What led you to that conclusion?
Ristvet: I happened to be training Dave Bedsun at the time, and
doing reentries. That was my only involvement, because my Pacific
work really was occupying my time. But I did take the time to come
out and help Dave do a reentry, primarily on Misty Rain. Once we
got into Misty Rain, which was really the first shot we reentered in
the kind of detail you needed to see everything, it became obvious
that the only thing that had been saving us from a containment
failure on the previous shots, including Huron Landing and Miner's
Iron, was what I call serendipidous block motion. We were shooting
the closures out before the stemming even got to them. A n d , if you
didn't have something holding the stemming in, it would go down
to the test chamber, and of course, the cavity would follow shortly
thereafter.
Misty Rain was just fortuitous. We were a gnat's eyebrow from
Mighty Oak on Misty Rain. I said that because of the Mighty Oak
geologic setting, the kind of block motion we needed probably
would not occur in the LOS drift. There would be block motion on
the one fault, but it would occur too late. This was based on the
breaking of timing wires, and other studies we had done, so we kind
of knew when block motion triggered with respect to ground shock.
If Pac Tech's calculations were anywhere near being correct, most
of the stemming would be past the fault before the fault would
move. My advice to DNA at the time was that it would cost more
money to fix Mighty Oak than there was equipment underground.
And so my advice was to go ahead and shoot it, and pray that there
would be the block motion to keep the stemming in.
Carothers: That must be a characteristic of a particular site or
a particular area, because there are a lot of tunnel shots that
behaved perfectly well.
Ristvet: Really only N tunnel is where we've seen a lot of block
motion, and that's because of the frequency of the faults and
fractures. Also the orientation of them is such with respect to the
residual stress field that they move easier than they do in P tunnel,
say. There we virtually don't have any faults or fractures, and in P
tunnel we don't see very much block motion.
Carothers: Ed, is there a reasonable consensus on the reasons

for the damage that happened on Mighty Oak? I have heard various
opinions expressed.
Peterson: There are a few people in the community who say,
and believe, that they understand exactly what happened on Mighty
Oak. I think that those people have never been able to convince a
reasonable group of other people. And I think if you really had
enough sound scientific evidence to show what happened, every-

body would be willing to accept it. People are out looking for the
answer.
So, it's interesting. DNA formed the Containment Advisory
Team that has looked at Mighty Oak in great detail. I think the
people on that committee have tried to look at it very objectively.
Everybody has been trying to find an answer, and I think we have
been unsuccessful in finding something that we can point to and say,
"It's because of this that Mighty Oak did what it did."
571
22
About the Containment Evaluation Panel
The Laboratory or Agency which conducts a nuclear detona-

tion is responsible for the selection of the site, and for the design of
any features necessary for containment. The Manager of the DOE
Nevada Office is responsible for the safe and proper conduct of the
experiment, including the requirement that successful containment
be accomplished. The Containment Evaluation Panel serves as an
advisory body to the Manager, NVO. It is the responsibility of the
Chairman of the Panel to give due consideration to the judgments of
the individual Panel members, summarize them, and make a recom-
mendation to the Manager as to whether, from the point of view of
the containment design, the event should proceed.
How well and how effectively the Panel has operated is, in
some measure, reflected in the fact that there have been only four
releases of radioactive material since June of 1971. For these four
cases the total amount of material released was quite small - - a total
of some 10,000 curies - - and was principally due to the seepage of
noble gases from the cavity. A comparison of the post-CEP releases
with a few of the major pre-CEP releases, and the total release into
the atmosphere for the atmospheric detonations at the NTS is given
in Table 1. Recall that for an atmospheric event the total fission
fragment inventory is released. For underground events the release
is fractionated to some degree by the passage of the material through
the earth, the tunnel, the pipe, or whatever the leak path was, and so
the comparison numbers should be regarded with that reservation in
mind.
TABLE 1
ALL POST-BANEBERRY RELEASES
Event Date Release(in Ci)
Camphor 1971 220

Diagonal Line 1971 6,800
Riola 1980 3,100
Agrini 1984 690
Total 10.810
SOME MAJOR PRE-CEP RELEASES
Event Date Release(in Ci)
Platte 1962 1,900,000

Eel 1962 1,900,000
Des Moines 1962 11,000,000
Baneberry 1970 6.700.000
Total 21.500.000
Release from NTS Atmospheric Tests 1951 - 1963

12,000,000,000Ci
About the Containment Evaluation Panel 573
To the extent that the Panel has been successful, or deserving

of some credit for the record of containment, that success is based
on several things, the most important of which are these:
First: The Manager, NVO, and officials of DOE and its
predecessor Agencies have been consistently and strongly commit-
ted to the need for successful containment of the events. They have
also been consistently supportive of the Panel's activities and
recommendations.
The CEP Charter, in Section III - DOE Policies, Paragraph D,
has the following words:
Considerations of cost, schedules, and test objectives shall not
influence the containment review of any test.
This charge is unusual in its breadth and in the authority it gives
to the Panel. Since the formation of the Panel in 1971, every
Manager, NVO, and every person in the Headquarters who has
headed the Division of Military Applications, or the Office of
Military Applications, or the Deputy Assistant Secretary, Military
Applications, when asked, has emphasized that it was their intention
that this charge be followed by the Panel. No member of any
sponsoring organization has ever challenged it, to the Chairman's
knowledge, or sought through those channels to modify or overturn
a recommendation of the Panel. And, there have been occasions
when the Panel's actions have caused considerable costs and sched-
ule delays for a proposed event.
Second: The Members and Alternate Members of the Panel do
not serve as representatives of any organization. This is a critical
point. They are individuals with experience in the field of under-
ground testing, and knowledge relevant to the containment of
underground detonations, who are nominated to serve as indepen-
dent experts and give their individual judgment concerning the
containment aspect of an event.
The Panel members do not vote as to whether an event is
expected to be successfully contained, with the majority opinion
being the one that necessarily goes forward. The concern of a single
member regarding some feature of a containment design has many
times been demonstrated to be sufficient to require further review
and resolution before the event can continue.
House: I remember one case where Bill Twenhofel, on the

Rousanne event, gave it a C! Well, a C is the death knell.
Carothers: I would not send something forward that carried a
C. In such a situation 1 generally suggest that possibly the
sponsoring Laboratory might wish to have the opportunity to
present further information and explanation before I send my
recommendation to the Manager.
House: And boy, did we. And as it turned out, it was a fairly
simple matter. There was a site characterization technique we had
employed that was a little new to the Panel, and Bill didn't
completely understand it. So we journeyed to his lair at the USGS
in Denver, and explained to Dr. T what it was we were doing, and
what we thought was significant about it, and how it substantiated
our structural interpretation. He said, "Oh, 1 see. 1 understand
that." So, he changed his statement, and we went ahead.
It can be a difficult thing to convince skeptical critics of
nuclear test work that the Panel is not some kind of rubber-stamp
group, staffed by the sponsoring organizations to give a public
facade of responsibility for their activities. Individual integrity has
unfortunately been so often shown to be lacking in governmental
processes that to claim it for the Panel members is usually met with
a raised eyebrow and clearly expressed doubt. Fortunately, the
record of the Panel members' activities and actions has been suffi-
cient to convince anyone willing to consider the evidence that the
members do, indeed, seriously and honestly review the containment
aspects of an event in the full spirit of the Charter.
Third: The sponsoring organizations, and their acceptance of
a need for successful containment, are an essential part of the
process. Here again, the matter of integrity and honesty is
paramount. The Panel fundamentally takes the position that the
material presented to them is, in fact, correct within the limits of the
Laboratory's and the presenter's knowledge. A mistake may be
made, but the assumption is that, if so, it is an honest mistake, and
not a lie. A clear example is the number that is given for the
maximum credible yield of the device. This is one of the most
important factors in determining the depth of burial, and the overall
phenomenology of the event. That number as given is accepted by
the Panel as the best that can be given for the particular device, and
that uncertainties which might exist in that number are fully
accounted for in the containment plan.
In the same way, the Panel accepts as fact that the containment
plan as reviewed by the CEP will be implemented in the field, and
that the characteristics of the various containment features as built
are as they were described to the Panel. The seeps and the leaks that
can occur are really prevented by the people in the field who install
the cable gas blocks, the cable fanouts, the stemming and plugs, and
so on. The Panel relies on the integrity and competence of those
people to do the job right, and to describe promptly and accurately
any deviations which may occur.
In any organization or Panel that has operated for over twenty
years, how it operates and how it might operate in a different manner
is a question seriously to be considered. A number of people, CEP
members, presenters, observers were asked their opinion of the
Panel, and how it operates.
Billy Hudson, LLNL, alternate Panel member:
Hudson: I think that by its very existence the Panel has a strong
effect on the way testing is carried out. Knowing that you have to
satisfy a Panel of relatively bright people who can ask penetrating
questions causes you to look very carefully at your designs. It
stimulates attention to detail.
Carothers: At a CEP presentation a person is in a public forum,
where the Panel members are going to ask questions. Most people
have a certain amount of pride in a situation like that. Not that
they're proud of being there, but they don't want to appear stupid
in front of everybody.
Hudson: That's right. That's part of it. Another part of it is
they don't want to be caught doing something that appears to be
stupid after the fact, if indeed there is a failure. So, the CEP is in
many ways a public hearing before the fact, only to be brought to
light should there be a problem. In that sense 1 think it has been a
very valuable body.
Carothers: What changes would you make in it?
Hudson: It works. Why change it? You know it could be done

cheaper, and you know it could be done faster, but you don't know
it could be done better. If you said, "Well, gee. That's not a good
enough answer. We really should try to do things as efficiently as
we can, without sacrifice of quality," then 1 would say that we could
probably make some changes in the CEP. I'm biased though. It's
my opinion that phenomenology is the important thing to consider
in understanding containment, or affecting containment. Disci-
plines like geology, for example, are only supplying data for the
phenomenologist to think about. In that context then, the role of
a geologist, or a hydrologist, should be to say, "Yes, I think you have
the right descriptive information," or "No, I don't think you have
the right descriptive information." They shouldn't have an opinion
about the containment of the event. I would say that in some ways
you might have a more effective Panel if it were comprised basically
of phenomenologists, and the geologists and hydrologists were cast
in the same role as the drilling and cementing people. They would
say, "Yes, we agree. You've got the right description," or, "No, we
think there's a problem," but not make a statement per se, or
categorize.
Evan Jenkins, geologist, USGS, alternate Panel member:
Carothers: How do you feel about how the CEP operates,

Evan? What differences would you like to see?
]enkins: I think the trend towards certain data, and the
presentation of only those data is a mistake. In other words, not
discussing all the data. I think that our purpose in existing as a Panel
is to review all aspects, no matter how benign they might be. And
I think it would certainly be beneficial, in a legal sense, should we
ever have a problem, to have reviewed all of the data that are
available, all that were collected.
Much of the data that has been collected is included as backup
data that the Labs have at every meeting, but don't show. For
example, the commonly accepted practice is to show the generally
east-west cross sections, but not the north-south cross sections. For
some events they don't even have a north-south cross section. They
should have it and show it. Those cross sections are usually just
horizontal lines, but it's comforting to know that all those lines are
horizontal. I think that trend of not showing data could get us into
trouble.
As a point of deviation from what I said, I think that the Panel
is good enough to recognize points in the document that should be
brought up. 1 hope that we on the geologic side are bright enough
to pick up things that should be brought up. I sometimes feel
uncomfortable because I certainly don't have expertise in the
physics, or the chemistry, or the engineering parts of the presenta-
tions.
Carothers: Those people don't have the expertise in geology
that you have. That's why there is a Panel.
Jenkins: Well, yes. 1 have to rely on those other people for
these other points. The geology, I think we can handle all right, but
I rather hate to sign my name to anything where I haven't seen
everything.
Tom Scolman, LANL, former Los Alamos Test Director:
Scolman: Let me say something that I think ought to be done.
A great deal of what we have done and do with the CEP, I believe,
is to lay down a record that could be examined by whomever. Come
back later, and that record offers rational reasons for doing what
we've done. It is a record that says, "Yes, indeed, we did look at
the proper things. We considered the proper things, and the fact
that this thing vented and killed eight thousand sheep in Utah can't
really be blamed on our particular community." Frankly, if I were
NVO, or if I were even Watkins (Secretary of Energy), I might be
inclined to have somebody who could come in with a more or less
clean slate, but some scientific appreciation of what we are trying
to do, and look and see if we really are doing the right things. Are
they defensible? Should we be doing things the way we are, even
though some of them were developed for other situations?
Carothers: Well, there are a couple of responses that I'd like
to make. One, to take the example of using, as stemming, the coarse
and fines layers that were developed for cased holes, in uncased
holes. The defense is that they have worked just fine, because LANL
has never, on any shot since Baneberry, had seepage on one of their
events. So, whether you can justify thatstemming design or not, the
fact is that it has worked successfully many, many of times.
Scolman: And that's the answer I get every time I bring it up.
Carothers: The other part of my response is that one of the
reasons I think the CEP stays the way it is, and does its business way
it does is that, like the coarse and fines layers, it has demonstrably
solved a problem hundreds of times. Another reason it stays the
way it is, is because today it is addressing a political problem as well
as a technical problem.
Scolman: That's the point 1 was making. And I wonder if is it
addressing it properly.
Carothers: Well, from the point of view NVO, DASMA, DOE
it is. On several occasions I have gone back to Washington for one
reason or another; sometimes because there was a worry about the
containmentof a particular shot, and I am the Chairman of the CEP.
1 go there and say, "I'd like to tell you about containment." And
these are very capable, concerned people who are probably think-
ing, "If this shot blows out of the ground, there's my career on the
line." We go through it, and hopefully they're reassured. Then I
say, "You know, we've been in business a long time. The Charter
for this Panel basically comes from you, and it says the following '.
. . '. Maybe that's appropriate, maybe it's not, in today's world.
If you want to change it, certainly that is your prerogative, and we'll
do it the way you want to do it." The answer always is, "I don't want
to change a thing."
So the Panel stays, and it produces this public record that
you're talking about - - we have looked at these various things, we
have made no radical departures, our record has been very good,
and we stay close to our previous experience.
Suppose you, Tom, decided there was a cheaper, better, but
very different kind of stemming, so you changed to that stemming
plan. Suppose some leak happened that had nothing at all to do with
that, but it happened. You wouldn't be able to justify the change
economically, calculationally, theoretically, or however. Some-
body would say, "Well, Tom, you had two hundred shots where
they didn't leak, and then you changed your stemming."
Scolman: Exactly. No, I agree. It's hard to argue with success.
Carothers: And that's what the people in Washington do not

want to do. Nor does the Manager of NVO. I have gone in and
offered my resignation to every new Manager. "No, that's fine. We
like it the way it is. I don't want to change anything." Actually, I
don't think they should.
Scolman: Well, I think the CEP is certainly necessary. I think
it's doing good service, and I frankly think, for example, that the
chances of us having a Pike-type event, with the CEP, are zero, other
than having some designer blow it and get a yield that is perhaps a
factor of two or three over design. We might have trouble
containing that. On the other hand, I know enough about the design
business to think that is pretty damn unlikely these days, so I don't
particularly worry about that one.
For a long time I was of the opinion that probably you could
come in and present Baneberry over again and get it okayed. I think
that's extremely unlikely the way things work these days. Baneberry
had enough things against it that you probably couldn't do it.
Carothers: I don't think there's any chance you could get
Baneberry approved. The drilling history alone would get it turned
down.
There are really two parts to containment. You don't want a
venting, and maybe the Panel has helped there. The rest of
containment is really the guys in the field, taking care of the seeps
and the leaks. Those are really prevented by the guys in the field
doing their job right. And, the Panel doesn't really know much
about that. The presenter says, "Well, these ,cables are gas
blocked." We say, "Oh, that's good," because cables can leak. But
the Panel relies on the integrity and competence of the people in the
field. So, maybe the best thing, or the only thing, that the Panel
really does is to try to prevent a Baneberry or a Pike.
Scolman: Well, it's interesting, because at least once a year my
containment people would come back from the CEP just infuriated,
because they felt they had been badly mistreated. That we, Los
Alamos, get treated much differently than Livermore does.
Carothers: I don't happen to believe that.
Scolman: Oh, I know that. I take it with a grain of salt. I

suspect the same thing happens in Livermore. In fact, Bob Kuckuck
has asked me, "How come, why do your containment people pick
on my containment people?"
Wendell Weart, geophysicist, Sandia, former Panel member

Carothers: What did you think of the CEP while you were on
it? Do you think it provided a useful function, or was it just a bunch
of hoops that the people had to jump through?
Weart: 1 think that in the early days, clearly, it did serve a
useful function, because it tended to formalize and focus people's
thinking and investigations on areas which experience had shown
could be critical. There's probably a lot that went on that wasn't
necessary, but it was one of those things that you never know until
you examine it. There has to be some formal process for forcing that
examination to occur. It's a containment quality assurance pro-
gram, sort of. And I think that while some of the investigations and
things would have proceeded without it, this was a way of making
sure that they did, and did in a formalized sense. Everyone knew
what was expected, and what kind of information had to be
provided. It was more structured than just progress by normal trial
and error.
I know there were some instances where one of the Laborato-
ries had to make significant changes - - sometimes in locations,
sometimes in designs - - before proceeding. And that is something
that clearly would not have been done for that particular event
without the CEP.
Bob Brownlee, LANL, Panel member
Carothers: What are your thoughts about the CEP, Bob?

Brownlee: That brings up a point which I think is fair to talk
about. I worry a little about the CEP when Jim Carothers, and Gary
Higgins, and I are no longer there. I've learned not to trust some
of those other guys, because they have not only no memory of the
past, which is to be expected, but they really do not have the lessons
of that history either. And therefore, they're capable of just going

way off on crazy things, and there needs to be some old hands to
balance things there.
We used to not have any turnover on the Panel, but we've had
a lot of turnover in recent times. There are some people that you
are just not going to educate, but there are a good many others that
don't take the time to get educated. And in a while there's not going
to be anybody to educate them. When I say that there can be human
error, that we're apt to do something really dumb, one of the places
where that can emerge is at the CEP.
I've done a thought experiment. Do I think that now, right now
today, I could, on my own endeavor - - although I'd like to consult
Gary Higgins about it - - design a shot in such a way that the
probability of failure was enormously increased, but I could still get
it past the CEP without them catching it? Could I get all A's on it?
There was a time when I would have thought, "No, I couldn't have."
And now I don't think I could either because of Jim, and Gary, and
me, and Carl Keller. But if I did just the right things, and conspired
with the Chairman, and with Gary, I think I could put through
something that would have a very much higher probability of failing
than normal, and get straight A's on it. I'll bet you that in five years
the ease with which I could do my thought experiment will be greatly
increased. And that worries me. Part of it is because the people
only go back to ' 6 3 , and as the years go by they don't even do that.
Joe Hearst, LLNL, observer.
Carothers: You've seen the CEP since the first days, when it
was formed. Do you think it does anything useful? Is it a function
that once was useful, and now isn't? What are your comments about
the CEP as a body, and about what it does.
Hearst: I think, on balance, it's a useful thing to keep the
Laboratories honest. Sometimes the Panel does things on the basis
of gut feeling, but I think there has to be some sort of reviewing body
to uphold standards of some sort. I'm not convinced that the CEP
does that as well as it might. I think a great deal of effort is wasted
in getting presentations just ever so, and in all the nitpicking - - all
the pre-meeting meetings, and all the worry about two decimal
places when you can only measure something to zero decimal

places. I think something like the Panel is desirable, but I'm not sure
that a lot of what the Panel does is worth the effort needed to make
the presentation acceptable.
You might find it interesting to go to a pre-CEP meeting, and
listen to the discussions of, "You don't want to say this because it
might raise a question," or, "You don't want to say that, because
it might inspire someone to ask questions," or, "You don't want to
present this information. Keep it as a backup, because it will just
lead to a long discussion."
Carothers: No, I have not been to such a meeting. The Panel
operates on a presumption that I think is most clearly demonstrated
in the question of yield. The Panel takes the given numbers at face
value. The belief is that the Laboratory is really telling them the
truth about what the design and maximum credible yields are. The
fundamental presumption upon which the Panel operates is that the
Laboratories will be honest. That shades off into an area with no
clear boundary. If everything the Laboratory presents is the truth
as they know it, but they don't present everything they know, is that
being honest?
Hearst: There is the feeling in these meetings that yes, you
should present what you know, but not necessarily all that you
know. And you should be very careful about how you work things
so you won't get somebody to follow something up and ask
questions.
It's like Brownlee saying, "Show me the viewgraphs you
haven't shown me. You always make those backup viewgraphs.
What are they for?" Those are things they know that they aren't
going to tell the Panel, unless they are specifically asked. "Gee, this
may make somebody think about differential compaction, so maybe
we shouldn't say that sentence. Maybe we should say something
different."
John Rambo, LLNL, presenter, observer
Carothers: When did you first start interacting with the CEP?
Rambo: I think I went to my first CEP within a year after
Baneberry.
Carothers: What's your view of the CEP? Does it serve a useful

function? Was it always, or has it turned into, a political bureau-
cratic creature, which just serves to validate things in a rubber-
stamp way?
Rambo: I think it has changed over the years. I think in the
beginning people were honestly frightened of what they didn't know
about what causes containment. That led to many ideas, and many
discussions about things that may not have pertained to containment.
Now it's as though those things have played themselves out over the
years.
Years ago somebody who had a personal idea about what
containment was all about might have said, "I think this one is a B,
or even worse, because I've got my private ideas on containment."
When those shots contained, and we went on and on, fewer and
fewer ideas were able to live through this whole mish-mash, because
the history said, "Look, we're containing, we're containing."
And so, I think this has kind of all evolved down to the place
where people have played out their ideas. Things seem to be going
pretty well, and we've fired in a number of different kinds of
geology, and we can't really sort out any more what's good and
what's bad. But the thing that scares me is that every once in awhile
I see something in a calculation that scares the hell out of me. But
then you go back to the usual things like material properties and
things of that sort, and they fall right in the middle. And yet, what
I'm seeing in the calculations can be pretty scary at times. So, what
do I do? I go to the CEP, in the current frame of things, and things
seem like they're just going through like a train running past the
station. It's the same old click, "Look at this," click, "Look at that,"
and the shot passes without any problems.
Byron Ristvet, DNA, Panel member:

Carothers: Is the CEP of any value to the DNA?
Ristvet: Yes. Oh yes. Let me tell you how the CEP helps me,
at least. I've always approached the CEP as if I were taking my
qualifying orals again for my doctorate. It is a similar type
experience, especially in the days of old, when the CEP was little
more rigorous, perhaps, in its questioning. But then again, I've
thought that maybe it isn't that they're less rigorous than they were,
it's just we're a lot better prepared, and we have convinced

ourselves, based on our CEP experience, of what lurks in the minds
of the people sitting at that table. Some people talk about, "Well,
do you think we can sell that to the CEP?" and I don't approach it
that way. I have never thought that way.
1 approach it in the manner that the CEP is going to base their
judgment primarily on experience, and if we don't have direct
experience we have to indirectly derive experience on things. Take
the the plugs, for example, the drift protection plugs. I started,
when I worked for Carl Keller, actually going out and field checking
these things myself, to make sure that they were pretty much like
we say the were to the CEP.
Now, 1 know nobody from the CEP, though they could if they
wanted to, could go out and field check what we have built. It just
helps me be prepared. I put myself in the position that I'm a CEP
Panel member when I'm putting the prospectus together, in that we
want to get the Panel to accept the shot, but we also want to assure
ourselves. That's why in our vessel concept we proof-test our
vessels. And it turns out that our proof-tests at three to five psi
above ambient in the tunnels is really a more severe test on the plugs
than if we did it at real pressures of perhaps one or two or three
hundred psi.
That is because basically we use the Bob Kennedy type
keyways, and that is where the plugs seat as you press against them,
and as they seat they create a hoop-stress in the rock surrounding
the plug. With our pressure grout rings behind those plugs it's
impossible for gas to flow around the plug, assuming a fairly
impermeable media, which we have in the zealotized tuff. We've
done a lot in suggesting the designs, but again, it is these engineering
practices, and the attention to detail that is so important.
And that's what's scary in the future, as we lose these people
who know what to look for through experience, and who know the
tricks of the trade.
Irv Williams, DASMA staff, DOE Washington

Williams: One of the things the CEP has done is try to make
sure that the Laboratory people have done their homework. And
if they haven't, you know, it's embarrassing to be asked certain
questions. I think the CEP is an absolute must, because with a
venting, I think we would go out of business permanently. Another

Baneberry, and 1 think we would be shut out of Nevada. And I don't
know any place we could ever go back and test, without a furor, and
that includes Amchitka. Therefore I think it behooves us to
maintain the integrity and the questioning ability of the CEP to make
sure the homework is done by the Laboratories, and that we feel
relatively confident that we're not going to have a leak. Without
that I think we jeopardize the future of any testing. And potentially
the end of the weapons program.
You do need to test, I'm convinced of that. I've been through
too many experiments, and too many times we've had people who
said, "It's a piece of cake." And then we get a surprise. Some are
little, and some are big. We can generally stand the little ones. The
big ones make you go back and do your homework. And you can't
do it on a computer. You can't do it on a shot table at Site 300,
or on a Fermex machine. The only way you can do that experiment
is underground.
We have to have the confidence the CEP brings to the Directors
(DASMA) here, because they do read the reports, and they do ask
questions. Occasionally I have to come back and ask the Panel,
"What did you mean?" The words are read, and it's amazing how
well they are read by the Directors. The Directors, once they take
the job, and they understand the responsibility that goes with it,
want to make sure that things are complete, and we try always to
make sure it is a complete package.
I've watched the Panel a long, long time, and I've attended
meetings where there were some . . . . inspiring discussions, let's
say. I think you need to keep inquiring minds in there, and continue
to realize that strange things do happen on shots. The people on the
Panel need to realize that. That's the big thing, I think. They've got
to realize that we get surprises out there. And I feel that maintaining
our record is crucial.
Carothers: The CEP Charter contains an unusual sentence,
which says that in considering the containment design the Panel shall
give no weight, pay no attention, to money, schedule, or data
acquisition. That's an unusual charge that the Panel has.
Williams: Yes, and it was intended at the time to say, "We

know people will cut corners. We want to make this so corners
aren't cut and there aren't incidents and accidents as a result of
that." It was meant to give a strong hand to the Panel. That's also
why they insisted on the independence of the Panel members.
1 have felt comfortable with the way the Panel has operated,
and the fact that it remains inquisitive. I would encourage them to
keep the Laboratory people on their toes in doing their work,
because we all have a tendency to think we're old hands, and dismiss
things. Try to make sure that the young bloods coming up are
inquisitive, and very serious about their endeavors, so they really
fully categorize the experiments. I think the life of the program,
from the technical side, rests on our ability to assure containment.
Carothers: 1 think the people on the Panel, and in the
Laboratories believe that too. But an attitude can develop in the
Laboratories that the object of the CEP meeting is "to get this thing
through." Rather than, "Let's go talk about it together, and see if
there's something we missed." That worries me.
Williams: That worries me too. 1 think there should automati-
cally be full disclosure to the Panel, because, what you might
consider to be inconsequential, someone else can consider to be
very serious. I feel that to be responsible they should have full
disclosure, and do it in descriptive terms, so you can communicate
with people back here, so we all understand it.
587
23
Thoughts, Opinions, Concerns
There are many uncertainties and ambiguities that surround the

subject of containment. Persons working in the field are certainly
aware of them, particularly in the areas of their own expertise. Still,
they have been called on many times to pass judgment on things
such as the acceptability of a proposed event location, or the
possible effect on containment of a particular experimental con-
figuration. Calculations can sometimes offer guidance. Past expe-
rience is useful, but not infallable. Ultimately it is the opinions and
beliefs of the people involved that weigh heavily in the decisions
that are made.
What follows is a collection of some of those opinions and
thoughts held by various of the people who have have been quoted
in the previous chapters.
Cliff Olsen
Olsen: I think one of the problems in containment is something
I had to learn, and I think I learned it slowly. In school, and I think
it's almost reinforced in graduate school, you focus closely on
something. You have to look at something in great detail, and you
tend to lose sight of the fact that there's something else close by.
You look at the mechanism of a particular reaction, and you isolate
it, and you figure that all out.
In the containment world the scenario is always changing; the
environment, and the mechanism concerned, is always changing.
For example, if you design a collimator having in mind only what it
does to the x-ray flux, and you forget that something else is going
to happen after the x-rays are long gone, you can get in real trouble.
So, you have to constantly keep thinking about what is going to
happen next. Where do we go from here? You have to keep looking
at different mechanisms all the time, and how they keep interacting.
You can't just say, "Okay, that thing did it's job. Now I can forget
it." For instance, on the early shots there were people who would
design an x-ray experiment, and they would install it, and forget all
about it. Eventually we learned that you can't do that. You have
to look at all the pieces, and you have to look at how they behave
promptly, and intermediately, and later on, and maybe even after
collapse, when the guy who designed it couldn't care less what it's
doing.
1 think that was one of the hardest lessons. We had to learn to
look through the entire time span of the test, which meant from the
time of lighting the HE on the primary to possibly way after it
collapsed, and we had to appreciate how everything was going to
behave through that whole time period, which is ten decades or
more, because a lot of it was uncontrollable. And we just didn't do
that in the beginning. We did things that worked fine for part of that
time span, but were dumb for a different part.
It was on Umber where a particular thing that became obvious
was that you had to concern yourself with things that happen as late
as collapse, and that you better be careful about how you engineer
stuff to survive collapse. Los Alamos had a line-of-sight pipe with
a bunch of valves going off to various things at the surface, and when
collapse occurred a couple of those valves sheared off. So, it just
started leaking, and there was nothing they could do about it. And
it leaked quite a bit.
Bob Bass
Carothers: Bob, what do you think is the fundamental mecha-
nism that leads to containment?
Bass: Mass.
Carothers: Billy Hudson, years ago said that he believed a foot
of overburden was more effective for containment than a foot of
printouts.
Bass: I think that's probably true. The question of the right
overburden has often worried me in Rainier Mesa. We're always
firing in the same part of Rainier Mesa, but occasionally there's been
a reason why we wanted to pull one out closer to the portal. Then
somebody says, "We've got the same amount of overburden, so it's
okay." But 1 don't know that it's as good overburden when you get
out towards the portal. It's more of a chopped up mess there. It's
got more stringers through it, it's got more damage from erosion.
Thoughts, Opinions, Concerns 589
I don't know that I would trust the same amount of overburden

there as I would way back in that mountain. I think you need a
competent, solid mass to contain a shot.
Paul Orkild
Orkild: I look at the structure first, then the rock type, and
then the water. And then at the stemming. Sometimes stemming,
to me, is the all important factor if the geologic media is benign.
Stemming is very important.
One of the things that I rely heavily on is past experience. I
think predictions about containment depends largely on judgment
developed from past experience. I believe that's very, very true. If
we didn't have the past experience of the people who are on the
Panel, I think that it would be much more difficult. I think that
what's going to happen, when you get a new, younger generation,
is that they'll struggle.
Carothers: No, they'll have this book.
Orkild: Oh, that's right.
Carothers: "What did Paul Orkild say about this situation?"
Orkild: Oh God!
Russ Duff
Duff: I guess as far as containment is concerned, I would
summarize my understanding of it by saying, "I don't." I have been
working in aspects of containment-related science since the early
sixties, and I've been running the DNA late-time containment
contract at S-Cubed for the better part of twenty years. In that
period of time I've become very aware of the extreme complexity
of the issues of containment. Containment is complex because the
phenomenology involved in the explosion includes not only shock
physics, but coupled to it are many other processes - - thermal
conduction, chemical reactions, diffusion, condensation, and so on
- - which occur simultaneously at extreme conditions. And they
occur in modified media, and those media aren't well known even
before they were modified.
Those phenomena are extremely complex, and our knowledge

base is so limited, and our diagnostics are so incomplete that not
only do we not know very much, but we're not learning at a
significant rate either. I think that in the containment world we're
dealing with a situation where a lot of people don't realize how
ignorant they are. If it aint broke, don't fix it is an attitude which
is unassailable in many respects, from an engineering point of view.
Carothers: Or a bureaucratic point of view. One of the things
I've always felt hampered the achieving of a better understanding of
containment is the fact that the present system is demonstrably
successful - - really remarkably successful considering how little
people know. And so, anyone quite reasonably could say, "Why in
the world should I spend any money on that stuff? You guys are
doing great."
Rambo: That's a very strong argument, and that's what 1 hear
all the time. You have to convince somebody you need to know
something, for a dollar value, and that's where the nebulous part of
this decision making comes in. What more do you need to know?
Until you have a problem, you'll never know that you needed to
know it.
Duff: I would make an alternative argument. We know that
Haymaker is the only event that has leaked in the 60 kiloton or so
range. We have shot I don't know how many events that have yields
higher than that. Even in the days before Baneberry, without all the
things we do these days, there never has been a leak from events in
that yield range, no matter what was done or not done.
So, using that as an example, I respond to your statement, "We
have a successful program, so why spend money," by arguing, "We
have a successful program which is wasting a lot of money in a lot
of respects. If we better understood what was going on we might
save a bundle." It might well be that if we understood what was
going on we could bury events at, say, just to make up some
numbers, a scaled depth of burial of 80 meters, with an attendant
savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cables, and drilling,
and stemming, and time. I can't prove any of that, and that's the
problem, but nobody can prove it's wrong either. We can't really
make a risk-benefit analysis and show that if you put out this much
money, you'll save that much. We can't do it because we don't

know what the answer is, or even what direction the search should
take.
And we deal with a management system, a real world environ-
ment, where containment is often a necessary evil. You, Jim, have
called it a reluctant science, because it is a drain on important
resources; time, money, and thought. And therefore, the Labora-
tories have been very conservative in their designs. They have done
very little in the way of what I would call containment research.
Their containment programs have been largely minimalist pro-
grams. They do whatever is required to get the job done, but no
more. No more. The science of containment has not, to me,
appeared to be a matter of much concern to the Laboratories.
Now, I understand that, but as a scientist who has lived and
worked at both Los Alamos and Livermore, and who has fond
memories of those days, I am frustrated, and have long been
frustrated, by the propensity to rely so heavily on experience. And
by the fact that so little is done that is aimed at trying to understand
what's really going on. There has been relatively little research and
analysis through the years by the people who are doing most of the
work, and progress has been relatively slow.
DNA, on the other hand, has at least had a long-term,
consistent program aimed at trying to understand what is going on
in some areas. Even there, however, there are very strong elements
of conservatism, and very strong parochial views, and play pens of
one sort and another. The economic, administrative, and political
constraints which have influenced the DNA effort are very real, and
they are constricting to the research aspects.
As a result, after spending a very fair fraction of my technical
career as a containment specialist, I can't claim to understand
what's going on very well. I think I have a broader understanding
of aspects of the phenomenology than many of the people who work
in the program, but that's only a comparative statement, not an
absolute statement in any way.
Bill Twenhofel
Carothers: Bill, when you look at a proposed event, what do

you look with regards to containment. What do you think is
important?
Twenhofel: I look to see whether there's anything about this
new shot that differs from previous experience, with emphasis on
geology of course. Are there any flags that come up that say, "This
location is different."
An active fault nearby that would move a lot would concern
me. And big acoustic interfaces, like the Paleozoics. We don't have
a lot of experience shooting near the Paleozoics. Obviously, high
carbonate content is a culprit. To summarize what geologic factors
should be looked at; faults, acoustic interfaces, carbonate content,
clay content, and anything that is not within experience.
Tom Kunkle
Kunkle: Why is it a hundred twenty scaled meters keeps a shot

in the ground? We have had shots vent. Only a few times, but shots
buried at eighty scaled meters have, on occasion, vented. Even ones
at larger scaled depths have. There is certainly historical precedent.
Baneberry, for example, a shot that was buried at what we consid-
ered a conservative scaled depth of burial was able to push gas to the
surface. So it is possible for shots today to do that.
That's a point that we, in modern times, tend easily to forget.
We have such confidence in our calculations and our history that we
tend to forget that it really is possible that shots buried at a hundred
and ten, or a hundred and twenty, or a hundred and thirty scaled
meters, or absolute depths of four hundred meters, could vent to
the surface. There's some reason that they stay in the ground, and
we think we understand that partly, but we don't have any good
corroboration. And so it's possible for me to get worried about
events, even very large, very deeply buried events.
Bill Flangas
Flangas: We tend to think of one kt as just a little shot, but one

kt is a fearful amount of explosion. If you convert that to boxes of
dynamite, you realize what a great amount of energy you've got
there. You do that under a variety of conditions, and a variety of
ground conditions — sometimes saturated with water, sometimes
not, sometimes perched water tables, sometimes a pattern of
fractures that may or may not lead into the ground zero, so there
are a lot of variables. Sometimes they react differently, but in one
lifetime I think the testing community has just done an extraordinar-
ily good job of dealing with violent explosions, and controlling
them.
Again, when you're dealing with a dynamic force this big, after
you've called your best shot, there are still surprises. And they will
continue to be there. I think though, between all of us, we have
certainly minimized them. I've seen published numbers of the shots
that have been done, and it's perfectly obvious we could not have
done, in one generation, our generation, that many hundreds of
atmospheric events to achieve the reliability of the weapons we have
today. I can just not imagine us having shot hundreds of atmo-
spheric shots.
Bob Bass
Bass: I'll tell you where money ought to be spent, when it is,
if it ever is. I'm effectively quoting Billy Hudson's ideas on this. I
think it's important that containment not rule the experiments. I
think there has been a tendency in recent years for containment to
be the driving feature. "You can't do that, because it isn't a good
containment idea." Billy says, "No. Tell us what you need to do,
and we'll figure how to do it."
Carothers: That's exactly right. I know that the Laboratories
don't present some things to the CEP. They say,"Well, we will just
get hassled about this, so we won't do it." That's wrong, because
the CEP might say, "You ought to calculate this," or "You ought to
do that, and I'd feel more comfortable, but it can be done."
Bass: Yep, "This is the rule, and this is what we follow." I say,
"Experimenters, come. Propose your experiment. There's a way
to do it." And if somebody comes up with a reason to do something,
we will find a way to do it.
Norton Rimer
Rimer: For containment, clearly absolute depth helps. There's
an example that's important that I don't think has ever been brought
up at the CEP. For example, if we ever shoot an event in granite,
we need a totally different depth of burial criteria to avoid seeps. I
did a number of calculations, probably fifteen years ago, for various
reasons, about shooting an event in granite. 1 think the containment
depth I came up with was at least 1 50 meters times the yield to the
one-third.
Carothers: By the existing criteria, that would be very conser-
vative.
Rimer: Well, I don't think it would be very conservative at all
for granite. I'd be happy with 180, but you know what drilling costs
are. It's another medium, and for releasing gases it's a different ball
game.
The stronger the rock is, the more it's likely to have tensile
failure. That's a funny thing to say, but it's a question of equilibrium
at the end. It's the question of continuity of radial stress, which is
a boundary condition. The amount that the radial stress can differ
from the hoop stress depends on the strength of the medium, so a
stronger medium can have hoop stresses much lower in compression
than a weak material like alluvium or tuff. A hard rhyolite is the
closest thing to a granite that we shoot in at the Test Site, but it's
not near as strong — it doesn't have near as high a wave speed. The
hardest rhyolite I've seen, the seismic velocity is 4200, 4400
meters a second, and you can get a shear modulus out of that.
Granite is 5500 meters a second.
I calculated Pile Driver ad infinitum. Tensile failure occurred
from the surface down to below the Pile Driver cavity, in those
calculations. Then we calculated deeper shots, on a scaled basis,
and even then I got fractures down to the cavity. It was only when
I got to higher than 150 scaled meters depth that there was a small
- - twenty, thirty meters - - zone of unfractured rock above the
cavity. Now, the porosity in some of those fractures was very small;
ten to the minus three. On the other hand, I didn't assume there
were joints down there, so even 150 meters scaled depth I'm not
all that happy with, for late time seeps.
That's based on tensile failure calculations that we did for
different yields and different depths. I think we did 1 OOkt at 1000
meters, 20kt at 1000 meters, 20kt at Piledriver depth, which was
460 meters. We did a number of calculations. We didn't do the
whole parameter space, and of course, the models were not as good
back then. We've improved some of the things in our description
since.
Bob Brownlee
Brownlee: I really think that we have reduced the probabilities

of venting so low that what we're apt to get caught up on is
something trivial. That's what I think. I am convinced that
nowadays the probability, by the time we get a shot reviewed and
down hole, ofit venting is very low for most of our shots. Of course,
it's not the same for all shots, so when we do a certain kind of shot,
the probability could be much higher. Now, I have argued you
ought to react differently depending upon what the circumstances
are. You can take the view, and I understand it, that it's good to
always look for the worse case and plan your activities accordingly.
My response to that is, "Yes, but that communicates the wrong idea
to people."
My feeling is that on the average shot now, if it cannot be
compared to any previous failure, then we have to postulate
something brand new to have it fail. And we have been testing long
enough with a variety of different kinds of things that something
brand new is highly improbable. Our luck has been that if it is likely
to have happened, it would have happened to us. We would have
given it the opportunity to happen already.
Carothers: Would you say, "That's true as long as you confine
yourself to the Nevada Test Site."
Brownlee: Oh, yes. That's implicit. Notice what I said. "If
you can't compare it with any failure we've had." That means at the
Nevada Test Site. If I go to a brand new area, in a brand new
medium, I now have nothing to compare to. I have to assume,
therefore, that I have to start over.
When we talk about containment, I've always lived in fear of

some perfectly simple thing that everybody knows is important
doesn't happen to get done. Once in a while I know that 1 annoy
the dickens out of people here, because I ask, finally, "Did you get
the stemming in the hole?" What I'm really asking is, "Have you
looked at the things everybody takes for granted?" And they hate
that question. They just hate it. But I still think that we've got a
chance one day of buying the farm for the most indefensible,
grossest, error.
Carothers: Duane Sewell would thoroughly agree with you
because, when he was at Livermore, he really was quite concerned
with safety. An often used expression of his was, "I'm concerned
about ten year-itis." You put some new people on a job, or project
where something bad could really happen. They didn't know what
they were doing, so they worried, and they worked hard, and they
learned, and after a time they got to where they were, in fact,
experts. And they did this risky business all the time.
Brownlee: And ten years later?
Carothers: Ten years later, of course, "This is a piece of cake."
But it's not a nicer piece of cake. It's no less a hazard than when
they first looked at it.
Brownlee: And it may be more of a hazard, because in the
meantime they've changed a cable, and they've changed the firing
set, and they've changed something else. And you've also probably
changed out the person who did it, and who remembers?
Byron Ristvet
Ristvet: Let me emphasize we have two definitions of

containment at DNA. One is in the classic CEP sense. At one time
our containment experience with horizontal line-of-sight shots
wasn't much better than the vertical experience of the Laboratories.
Today, with regards to the CEP kind of containment, I have very
little concern about uncontrolled leakage to the atmosphere from a
DNA event. That is especially true now with the lower yield events.
For low yields our tunnel volumes are huge, so any threats against
the plugs are rather small, and it really makes that part pretty
straightforward. Especially because we proof test everything, and
we do spend a lot of time on attention to detail.
Carothers: The DNA people really work very hard to protect

the samples. If they achieve that, any release is very unlikely.
Ristvet: That's exactly correct. Sample protection is our other
definition of containment, and that is very important to us. We have
spent a lot of effort trying to understand how to be as confident of
that as we are about a release to the atmosphere, but there can still
be surprises there.
Ed Peterson
Peterson: Let me tell you what I think our design philosophy

for the line-of-sight events has been very recently, and in which I
really believe. I think that in a containment design you have to make
the first closure, the one that's closest to the working point,
sufficiently strong so it can act as a bulkhead to the stemming. You
have to know that closure works, and no matter what pressures you
get in that stemming for whatever reason, you won't extrude the
stemming out through that bulkhead. In the low yield case this has
so far worked satisfactorily with the FAC. I suspect in the standard
yield shots we have from now on the first closure will be a real heavy-
duty closure that can do that. DNA has been designing one like that.
So that's sort of number one.
I think the second thing you have to do is, once you understand
within your error bars what the conditions of the formation are
where you're working, and you know your yield so you know where
to place that closure, you then make your line-of-sight pipe so it fits
the closure at that place. In other words, you don't move your
closure just to accommodate a bigger pipe taper.
I think those two things are basic. Make sure that first closure
can act as a stemming bulkhead so you can't extrude your stemming
out, and then make sure you position that closure correctly, and
make your line-of-sight pipe taper accordingly. I think those are the
two major design features. All the other stuff is nice, and all the
other stuff you should probably do, but those are the ones I think
will save you if something goes wrong.
Of course, you have to go into things you consider sort of QA,

such as making sure your tunnel diameters are right, making sure
that the grouts are in per their design characteristics, and on and on
like that. We aren't to the point where we want to throw any safety
margin away.
Carothers: To oversimplify, "Don't get too sophisticated.
You've got to have some strength close in to handle things. If you
have that, it will make up for a lot of what you don't know."
Peterson: 1 think that's true. 1 think we do a lot of, call them
good analyses or sophisticated or difficult analyses, and 1 think
they've been very good in that they have given us a way of thinking
about things. In other words, they give us some idea of how things
may be occurring, and what parameters may be important, and
which ones may affect you. But I don't think that at this point you
can consider them predictive type analyses you can base a design on.
1 think that since you don't want it to leak, you'll want to look at
the things that will serve as a brute-force type of containment.
One of the calculations we do routinely is to look at the
conditions at both the overburden plug and the gas-seal plug. We've
looked at them compared to events where stuff has gotten into the
tunnel, and we have not as yet measured anything in the tunnel that
is worse than our worse case prediction. Exactly why 1 don't know,
but we haven't. And I think those plugs are very important as far
as backup goes. Everybody wants to design the tunnel stemming
right so nothing gets into the tunnel complex, for obvious reasons.
But I don't think you could ever guarantee that something won't
happen.
It is a little frustrating, and discouraging sometimes, to look at
what you've done, and realize that you cannot really model
containment as such. I suppose one would like to, but I don't know
how soon that will be possible.
Carothers: Well, there are people who believe you can build
an expert system and just punch in the parameters of the shot, and
it will tell you what to do.
Peterson: I think those are only the people who don't
understand. My picture of the expert system may be different than
yours. I see the expert system as being able to provide you with
some idea of things that have gone on before, and some idea as to
why they've gone on. In other words, if you come up with a
particular problem you might be able to access your expert system

and put in that problem, and then you might be able to call up what
Joe LaComb says one should do. But I think it's going to be
meaningless unless you also get the joe LaComb type person to tell
you why he thinks that is why you should do it. If you don't get the
understanding behind it, I think just having the facts are worthless.
So I think the expert system might give you some aid in being able
to learn how to think about it, or at least know what previous people
have thought about it.
Carothers: There's more to knowledge than facts. I have a
little poster my daughter Margaret once gave me. It has a picture
of three apples. One is green, and one is yellow, and one is red, and
it says, "Time ripens all things. No one is born wise." And so
sometimes it is worthwhile to talk to a person who has had time
enough to get a certain amount of wisdom. It's often easier to find
facts.
Peterson: That is true. People like Gary Higgins and Russ Duff
and Bob Brownlee and ]oe LaComb have an insight, from having
been around the program for so many years, that other people just
do not have. And it will eventually get lost. You can't learn from
them all the things that they know.
I think when I first came to S-Cubed people sort of believed
they understood containment. Now, there were always disagree-
ments within the community as to what we understood, but one
cannot really argue against success. I think it has become apparent,
in the last seven tests, say, even though most of them have worked
extremely well, that some of the things we thought we understood
we really don't understand well at all. And I think everyone, or
nearly everyone, in the community is beginning to believe that. I
think that belief is also necessary in order for people to go forward,
and so I think that has been a benefit in gaining understanding.
If you get down to the more technical detail of things, I think
we have hurt ourselves by compartmentalizing things. There have
been various efforts over the years not to do that, but for whatever
million reasons, that is the way it has come out. We have divided
things up on time scales, and divided things up between work
groups. As an example, we look at pipe flow, and we look at cavity
growth and cavity conditions, we look at ground motions, we look
at stemming plug formations, and we look at late-time leakage. A l l
of those things are very important, and they all ought to be looked
at. And the capability to look at each one of these needed to be
developed. But when you break them up in order to develop them,
I think you lose sight of the fact that you've only broken them up
so you could look at them individually and develop some type of
model. You lose sight of the fact that they are interactive, and you
forget to look at the interactive part. I personally believe, in terms
of the modeling and the understanding, that is the next direction
that one has to go.
In other words, if I understand material properties perfectly,
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to calculate containment anyway,
because I don't know how material properties interact with all of
these other things. So, I see that as the thing that really has to be
addressed. I have no idea how to do it. Everyone has ideas, but it's
nothing trivial, so one shouldn't look at it and say people over the
last fifteen years have neglected it, or something like that. It's an
extremely difficult thing to do. I'm not sure how one can do it, but
I think you have to look at it.
Another thing is that I think we don't even know how to
proceed on some of the problems from the physics standpoint. It
isn't that you don't have an expert; you don't even know what you
should be expert in. Jim, you're very familiar with it, you've sat
through all of these things for years. You know, for example that
even on something like a Mighty Oak, the leakage doesn't come
until on the order of seconds or minutes. Our calculations stop at
less than a second. If we have a stemming column that "fails"
enough to let something leak, maybe it has another half a percent
porosity compared to one that works perfectly. You don't even
know exactly what physics to start building in, or how to do it. So,
I don't even know how to interact with a neighbor who's doing a
different calculation. I don't even know what kind of an expert 1
ought to go talk to. It's just that there are very fundamental
questions that are hard to get an answer to. I don't know the
answers. We've learned a lot, but I'm not sure that we understand
containment. We know a lot more about it than we did, but I don't
think we really understand it.
Carter Broyles
Broyles: I think we at Sandia still take seriously the charge we
got when we went back to testing after Baneberry, which was that
each of the three Labs was charged with an aggressive, active RSCD
program for containment. And I've used that to justify our
programm. A lot of people say Sandia doesn't sponsor tests any
more, so why should it waste its time? It seems to me that we have
served a useful purpose as an independent group, without an ax to
grind, a lot of times. Perhaps it's useful to have that third party
there at the CEP, and other places.
Carothers: It is. And, your people have produced a lot of very
useful data.
Broyles: Well, we certainly have had a better record than a lot
of other organizations. We've had a lot more continuity and
devotion, but you can get into all sorts of philosophical arguments
having nothing to do with containment about what produces good
results. I still hold, as a personal belief, that if you have the total
responsibility for the program, as well as the measurements, you're
going to come out on the whole with better results. It's not that
you've got better people, but you don't have the artificial divisions
where things tend to fall through the cracks that you have if you
have six different contractors doing different parts of the job, and
then trying to have what is essentially a contract monitor put it all
together.
Something I've seen over the years, probably more in the last
five than in the early days, is a more cooperative, not only attitude,
but effort on the part of all of the players toward working together,
sharing their capabilities. I think DNA, and LASL, and Livermore
working together, reinforcing each other, has contributed a lot
more now than it did in the early days of Baneberry and prior to that.
But everybody has, Sandia just as much as anybody else, the
feeding that if we didn't do it we can't trust it. When you've got
the responsibility - - that's something that a lot of people in the
system have never faced. It's like the General who's developing the
Minuteman, or the Admiral who's developing the Trident. When
his neck is on the line, and he has to guarantee something, that's one
thing. If you sit down and ask for a scientific judgment, that's
another thing. What you demand in proof, I think, is justifiably
different in the two cases. I can be scientifically very certain that

something is true, but am I willing to bet the nation's security on it?
That's different, and the proof I'm going to ask for is going to be
different. 1 can recognize that, when I sit back and try to be
objective. There are a lot of people not connected with the test
business who don't really understand that, because they've never
been in those kinds of positions.
Tom Scolman
Scolman: Frankly, my biggest concern about containment is
that the CEP, over the years, has evolved into some kind of ritual
raindance, which forces us to do things not because they make a hell
of a lot of sense, but because it's what we've always done.
Unfortunately, while we at one time had an organization called a
Containment Research Committee, one really can't do research on
containment, because you're not allowed to do an experiment that
pushes you beyond the known containment boundaries. So, we are
more or less forced to do things the way we've always done them
before. Take one of the points that I referred to earlier; the fact that
the containment scheme that Los Alamos uses, at least, was largely
designed in the days when all holes were cased, and I think many of
the things we do don't really make an awful lot of sense, or are
completely justifiable in the days when a majority of our shots are
done in uncased holes.
For another example, I think there's a great deal more to the
containment business than depth of burial, which always comes
from the same scaled depth. That assumes you're shooting in a
known, homogeneous media, and you never do. I argue, for
example, that with the faulting that exists at the Nevada Test Site
we have probably, without knowing it, fired in almost any configu-
ration you could have managed with respect to a fault. And yet we
sometimes reject shot locations because of proximity to faults. We
worry about reflections from hard layers, and yet we can't find those
hard layers when we do seismic work. We know the layers are there,
but do they matter?
Carothers: What you're saying is seismic work uses acoustic
reflections and you can't see those layers. So, how can the shock
wave from the shot see them?
Scolman: I've asked that question several times and haven't

had any answer yet.
Local geology is important. There are blocks, joints, faults,
little ones, big ones. I think what you come back to is the fact that
you cannot calculate in the detail that would be necessary, for a
number of reasons. The thing you really fall back on is previous
experience. And that drives you into doing things that, while they
may not be completely justifiable in a theoretical sense, at least
they've worked, and it's hard to go away from them.
Carl Keller
Keller: At DNA I think we had a different concept of what the

future held than the Laboratories did. We had the time to develop
test concepts, and the presumption was that we were going to keep
on testing, and that we would need these things. The Laboratory
people tended to be in a reactive situation where, if they were going
to spend anything on research, it had to be identified as necessary
to do a particular shot. And that shot almost never was more than
a year or so away, and so all the work had to be done at least six
months before the shot. So, what was done was generally only in
reaction to a unique geologic circumstance, or a unique test
geometry.
Bruce Wheeler
Carothers: To what extent do you think the containment
requirements, which were severe, had an impact on the programs
you were trying to accomodate? Did they really constraint you?
Wheeler: I don't think the containment requirements had a
great impact in terms of how long it took to get the test ready - - to
build it, and get ready to go. They added some cost, but it wasn't
a lot in terms of the overall cost. Back in Misty North times, that
was a twenty-five million dollar shot. Diamond Skulls was thirty-two
million. Those two shots today would probably be a hundred
million each.
So, whatever incremental cost you could attribute to the

increased containment concerns had to be a small percentage. So,
I never looked at containment as something that got in our way;
rather I looked at it as something that if we did it right would help
the program continue.
Billy Hudson
Carothers: Billy, it has been my impression that you are not

a strong believer in the residual stress field as a basic, or the basic,
mechanism for the containment of a shot. Comments?
Hudson: So there's residual stress. We may always have
residual stress of some sort, but is residual stress the key to
containment? I can imagine residual stress in a medium comprised
of marbles, but marbles wouldn't be a very good container for high
pressure gas. Cracks can open, the ground can shift, rocks can shift
around. At a quarter of kilobar or so, which is sort of where the
residual stress regime is, you wouldn't expect these openings to be
smashed shut again. So it's not clear that residual stress can affect
containment in the first place, even if it is there.
An interesting puzzle is Baneberry. We didn't talk very much
about residual stress before Baneberry, if we did at all. The
Baneberry release didn't begin until something like three and a half
minutes after the shot. It's hard to tie that time into the models that
have been proposed. Most of the models would show failure at
much earlier times.
I think containment is a combination of hydrofractures, leak-
age into porous storage areas, residual stress fields which prevent
continuing hydrofractures, good stemming plugs. It's all of that.
We know that the failure of a stemming column can cause a release,
but probably there's not nearly as critical a relationship as far as the
residual stress, or the hydrofractures are concerned.
Carothers: What about the difference in the containment
between the hundred kiloton shots and the one kiloton shots?
Hudson: There was a perceived difference that the big shots
didn't leak, the little ones did. But as we started to take measure-
ments, as we began to get some data down hole in the stemming
column on the higher yield events, we discovered their behavior, at
least in the stemming column, was much more like the low yield
events than we had suspected. At one time the data seemed to

indicate that if events were of higher yield than between ten and
twenty kilotons, gas just didn't get out of the cavity. But then we
started making measurements in the stemming column on events
with yields in those ranges, and we discovered that gas got out of the
cavity just about as often, and went as high, as it did on low yield
events. So, high and low yield events may not be as different as we
once thought. It may be a matter of depth more than yield. If you
bury them deep enough, even though the yield is a lot higher, they
may be more likely to contain. We really don't understand the
difference, but the phenomenology is not as different as we once
thought it was.
Carothers: There is an argument about the observed lack of
releases from high yield shots, advanced by Gary Higgins. He says,
"Well, that's easy to understand, because you guys are using the
wrong scaling law. The containment depth really doesn't go as as
the yield to the 1 /3 power. Because there's the gravity field it really
goes as the yield to the 1/3.4 power, properly. There's no
difference at one kiloton, but the higher the yield, the more
conservative you're being if you use an exponent of 1/3 instead of
1/3.4. You could have shot Cannikin at 4000 feet, rather than
6000, perfectly safely, using the right scaling."
Hudson: The scaling laws, it seems to me, only concern
prompt venting, not the seepages. With regard to seepages, I don't
think the bomb knows how deep it is. It just tries, however it can,
to find it's way to the surface. In the dynamic case there are all sorts
of things going on. There is spall. If it's deep enough spall is not
a problem. You have large fractures formed radial to the cavity.
Clearly, if it's deep enough none of those are going to get close to
the surface. As far as the dynamic features are concerned, Gary
Higgins may be absolutely right. It could very well be that the
scaling rules we use really don't apply. Unfortunately we don't
understand these relationships well enough to argue convincingly
that we should bury higher yield shots at shallower scaled depths.
Carothers: Well, after Baneberry there wasn't any testing for
about six months. Prior to that time, about a third of the shots
released activity, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. After
Baneberry, that pretty much stopped. What happened? I don't
think you learned anything new in those six months, but all the
leakages stopped, with the exception of four events over twenty
years. What do you think accounts for that?
Hudson: One cause was that we adopted a minimum depth of
burial. Statistically, for events sited in alluvium before that time,
approximately twice as many events involved a release if they were
buried shallower than 500 feet, as those events buried deeper than
600 feet. And so, one of the things we did was to adopt a minimum
depth of burial. What that did was to avoid some of the higher
carbonate content alluvium near the surface.
Even before Baneberry we had adopted the practice of putting
cable gas blocks on all cables. I think that was just shortly before
Baneberry. The combination of those two acts - - putting in the gas
blocks, and increasing the depth of burial - - I think was primarily
responsible for eliminating most of those releases.
Right after Baneberry we did quite a few things that we later
stopped doing, because we didn't need them. For example, when
we had experiments in the emplacement pipe we had sections of the
pipe that were malleable. We thought that would help the ground
shock closure. These soft pipe sections were fairly expensive. We
never did show whether they helped or didn't help, and after a while
we decided we didn't need them. We did a lot of things right after
Baneberry. Everything we could think of, almost, became a viable
suggestion as a solution to some problem.
Carothers: The minimum depth of burial of 600 feet has
carried on to today. There are people who occasionally grumble
about that when they do a twenty ton shot. Do you think it's really
needed for shots like that?
Hudson: The answer is, "Of course not. It's not always
needed." The problem is, you never know exactly what the yield
is going to be. You never know for sure when you're going to need
that depth. If the maximum credible yield is really twenty tons, you
probably don't need the 600 feet. Then you have to decide what
you do need, and why the shot is going to be contained as well at
a shallower depth. After a while people would probably decide that
it was easier and cheaper just to use 600 feet.
Actually, it's questionable whether we should be shooting in

alluvium at all. You will notice that there have been very few shots
in alluvium since Agrini. Agrini was a shot in alluvium, and there
was a release through a strange subsidence crater. The crater was
something like 200 feet deep; very deep compared to its diameter.
So there was probably much less rubble to filter the gas and debris
before they got to the surface than on a normal shot.
After intense study of the Agrini event, we decided the only
thing we could have done that would really have guaranteed that we
didn't have that late time release would have been to avoid the
noncondensable gas, which is primarily the carbon dioxide released
from the carbonate minerals in the cavity region. While no one
made a public statement about it, for several years we did not fire
events in alluvium.
Statistics suggested that it you stayed at carbonate contents
below 5% it was unlikely that you would have a late time release
problem. Above 5% you're much more likely to. We had the Riola
event, which was a case where a plug failed, and we had a late time
release. The carbonate content for Riola was only about 2 1/2%,
so people tended to ignore the carbonate problem, and focus on the
plug that failed. Then Agrini came along, where we had a late time
release with a strange subsidence crater; and the carbonate content
was 2.54%.
I argued that in both cases we might very well have had a
release without the strange occurrences associated with those
events, and that if we wanted to avoid that sort of release we should
stay out of the alluvium. Often we really can't tell what the
carbonate content is. We make measurements, but they're not
representative, and it could be that the carbonate content at either
of those two sites was high enough to cause a release.
In tuff we've only had one event, as far as I know, in the history
of testing, where there was a late time release, and no one really
understands why it happened on that shot. I talked to Larry
McKague about that, and he suggested that perhaps there was a
pocket of stream gravel, in the vicinity of the working point, that
could have given rise to that release. If you throw that one out as
maybe being a weird geometry, there just isn't enough carbonate in
tuffaceous material to be a problem. But you can always have it in
alluvium.
Billy Hudson's closing words perhaps make a suitable

summary and ending for this book.
I guess the upshot of all that is, we still don't

really understand containment very well.
609
611
APPENDIX
The people who made this book possible. Somethings about
them in their words.
613
Fred App
LANL — Alternate Panel Member
1 went to school at Penn State, and my degree is in geophysics.

I graduated from there in 1959. From there I went into the oil
patch with Continental Oil Company, and spent six years in
exploration geophysics, mostly with seismographs. It was mostly
field work, but there was some analysis. About the first four years
were field work, and the last two were mostly in the office.
In the field we did a standard type of reflection geophone
seismic survey to determine the structural configuration of the
strata. One way of doing that is to put the energy source, dynamite,
down a hundred foot deep hole. You have several holes spaced
some distance apart, depending on what kind of a survey it is, and
then there is a surface geophone layout to pick up the signals. We
have done them at the Test Site.
mM
There are various types of surveys that are made; there are
explosion surveys, and vibroseis surveys. The vibroseis sends out a
sweep of signal frequencies in about six or seven seconds, and no
frequency repeats itself in the sweep. So, it's a unique wave form
that goes out, and they cross correlate what comes back with the
sweeps, and you end up with your actual time history recording.
The vibroseis system was invented by Conoco, and at the time 1 was
working with them nobody else was licensed to use the system. Only
Conoco had it.
There were two reasons why I left Conoco. One, I simply got
tired of that particular line of work. I wanted to move into hard rock
geophysics, that 1 thought would be more interesting. The other
reason was that in order to be successful, and really advance with
the company, you would, almost by definition, end up in Houston.
That was the headquarters, and was not an end point 1 desired to be
at.
Another option was Ponca City, Oklahoma, which was better.
It's north of Oklahoma City. Of course, if you look at a frequency
chart for tornados, you'll see a contour closure that takes in Wichita
to the north, and Oklahoma City to the south. And Ponca City is
right in the middle. But it's a nice place.
So, for those reasons 1 decided I wanted to try something
different, and for a short while I was with Anaconda, in Butte,
Montana. That was a mistake. It was copper mining, in deep mines.
In Montana I was working below sea level, an indication of how deep
the mines are. One mine was 6000 feet deep. It took a while to
get down, and to get back up.
As far as I was concerned, that whole operation was very
dangerous. The company itself was not very safety conscious.
There were many ladders with rungs missing, and that sort of thing.
They had No Smoking signs right at the shaft, and of course
everybody would be smoking — and that was the only way out. I
left primarily because of the safety problems.
I returned to my wife's home town in North Dakota. I had quit
Anaconda without having another job lined up. I started reading the
classified ads in the papers, and applied for and got a job with
Control Data. Control Data at that time was a booming outfit, and
the reason they were booming was because places like Los Alamos
and Livermore were buying their 6600 at that time.
615
At that time Control Data was flush with cash, but they were
shy of programmers. So they decided to try an experiment. They
decided to take applicants from everywhere — one person might be
an art major, just out of school. Another person might be an
electrical engineer who had been in the business for ten or fifteen
years. In one case they took a seismic explorationist, namely me.
I believe there were about 35 in the group. We were brought in to
Minneapolis, but they did not bring our families because it was quite
intensive training; days, nights, and weekends. You had enough
time to sleep and that was it. A second reason reason for excluding
families was because if you failed the course, you were not hired. I
successfully completed the course, and became a permanent em-
ployee of Control Data. I stayed with them for five years. However,
all along I knew I did not want to remain in a large city, so I
continued searching for employment.
In 1971 I read an ad in the Minneapolis Tribune, offering jobs
at Los Alamos, with talk about the beautiful mountains, and skiing,
and hunting, and all that sort of thing. These jobs were for C
Division, which is the computer division. I applied, and they invited
me down. I talked to two C groups. In the meantime Bob Brownlee
happened to see my resume, and he asked to interview me as well.
After I had interviewed the three groups I had no doubt about my
first choice. The way Bob described the containment work, and
what was involved, appealed to me.
Bob Bass
Sandia - - Shock Physics
I'm a physicist, so to speak. I went to school in Lawrenceburg,

Missouri, which is near Kansas City, in my grade school days and
high school. My high school background is rather mixed-up, and
strange, and messy - - screwed up by the war.
Missouri had a very strange, and little known situation. It was
patterned after the University of Chicago, where you can start to
college whenever you're ready, and whenever you can pass the
entrance exams. There was not even a limit, at that time, on how
many hours of high school credits you had to have. So, I and about
four or five other people in my high school class decided we had had
enough of high school We decided, "Hey, we've had enough of this.
We know everything. Let's go to college."
617
So, I started in college, at the age of fifteen, at a place called

Central Missouri State College, which is now Central Missouri State
University. By the time my high school class graduated I was well
along as junior in college, mainly because there was this Navy V-12
program at the school, so it was on a trimester basis. So, you could
get sixty hours in one year, and I did. By the time my high school
class graduated I think I had about seventy hours of college credit.
And I had no problems with that at all. It was easy, duck-soup easy.
I was also helped by the fact that I was six feet seven inches tall at
that time, and weighed about 220 pounds.
I stayed there for one year plus, and then went to the
University of Missouri. I started out in chemical engineering, or
something like that. I had studied more chemistry than anything
else, but it was all physical chemistry. Then the draft came along,
and I ended up in the Navy, at first.
I went to San Diego, and went through part of boot camp there,
and then they discovered I was too tall to be in the Navy. The war
was over, so they said, "Out." I said, "Fine. I'll go." So, I went
back to Central Missouri State, and graduated right away. Over all,
I think I finished in two and a half years. The degree turned out to
be a double major in chemistry and physics, with some background
in economics, of all things. And what are you going to do with that?
So, I went looking around a little for a few months, doing
nothing, and I ended up going to graduate school at the University
of Missouri, in physics. I had discovered that chemistry was a nice,
interesting field, with some very nice people as professors. Some
of the most entertaining people I have ever known were organic
chemists. But, I didn't feel too comfortable with all of that, so I
ended up at the University of Missouri, in physics. I fiddled along
at Missouri, not being the greatest student in the world, to be honest
about it all. But I was chugging along, and then came Vietnam.
At that time there was no such thing as an educational
deferment, and so I was draft bait, and I ended up in the Army. I
ended up in Fort Hood, Texas. ]ust about that time they were
beginning to think there should be educational deferments, and they
had begun selecting out people with some educational background.
They were sending these guys back through the Pentagon for
assignment, as enlisted men, all over the United States. I ended up

at Fort Myer, in Washington, and at that time they were getting
ready to do a thing called Operation Windstorm.
Operation Windstorm was an underground shot, scheduled for
Amchitka in 1951. It was to be a cratering event. So, they had all
these plans going forward, and the Signal Corps had a major project
to measure the residual contamination from a cratering burst. They
contracted this job out to the National Bureau of Standards, and
lucky me, I got to go to the National Bureau of Standards, in
Washington, as a civilian guest worker. The Army sent me there,
on travel status, and I spent two years on travel status for the Army,
working at the Bureau of Standards.
Then it became obvious that Amchitka was the wrong place to
be using as a test site, because, for one thing, the Russians were
listening in on it all the time. At the NBS we had built a huge system,
to be used on Amchitka, to measure residual contamination.
Everything was in waterproof packaging. It was to be installed in
prefabed underground concrete structures that had been built by
the Navy up in Seattle, or somewhere. We were all done; we were
ready to go. The Navy was ready to start shipping these prefab
structures to Amchitka. And what did they do? They turned
around and shipped them all to Nevada, and this became instrumen-
tation on Jangle ESS. So, we had all these waterproof concrete
bunkers out in the desert.
The detectors were all underground in these structures, and
they jumped up out of the ground after the blast wave went by; there
were elevators to raise them up. There were 121 channels, and we
recorded 121 channels of perfect data. Of course, we had two
years to get ready. And in those days we had an unlimited amount
of money, and we had the whole backing of the National Bureau of
Standards to get good data. I have never been associated with
something like that before or since.
When I got out I went back to finish my doctorate. Then I made
the greatest mistake of my life. I left the Signal Corps in July, drove
back to Missouri, drove back to the campus of the University of
Missouri, and went to visit friends in the veteran's housing area. I
looked at the poverty those guys were living in, and I said, "I can't
do this. There's no way." I was making 850 dollars a month in
619
1953. That was pretty good income. I was single. When I was
living in Nevada we were getting expenses the whole time. I was
very rich. It was more money than I knew what to do with.
Looking at the campus environment, I couldn't do it. I said,
"I'm not going to do that. That's not for me, right now. I'm making
too much money." So, I went to work at a radio station, and fiddled
around. At the time, though, I had met some people from Sandia,
working at the Test Site. I liked what I saw, I liked what they did,
and I said to myself, "The Department of Defense is on the outer
edge of all this. I'd rather be in the middle." So, I knew people from
Sandia, and that's where my formal education stopped for a while.
I decided to capitalize on what I had done through the years, and
keep on making money. But I went to work at Sandia for 500 dollars
a month, so I took a big cut.
CAGING THE DRAGON
Robert Brownlee
Los Alamos — Panel Member
1 did my undergraduate work at Sterling College, which is a

small four-year college in central Kansas. When I was an under-
graduate 1 couldn't decide whether to major in math or physics, so
1 majored in both of them. I got my degree, but meanwhile a war
had intervened. Then I went to the University of Kansas, where I
got my master's degree. After that I decided, "1 think I'll just go
into astronomy." It turned out that all my training was not
immediately applicable to astronomy, so I had to go back and pick
up all the undergraduate courses in astronomy. I then went to
Indiana University, where I got my Ph.D. from Indiana University
in 1955. I got my degree in astronomy and astrophysics.
Carothers: Well, that's an impractical, but interesting branch
of physics.
621
Precisely what my father said. When I graduated the as-

tronomy world was a closed system. The heads of the astronomy
departments in these several schools decided, in some dark closet,
two or three times in the course of the school year, which of their
students they would graduate, and which they would flunk out.
What they did was match the graduates with the openings they were
going to have the following year. So, when you graduated, the head
of your department whispered in your ear, "You should apply for
that job over there. You'll have a good chance of getting that one,
but don't bother applying for that other one, because you don't
have a chance." I think the year I got my Ph.D. there were four of
us in the U.S., because that was all the openings there were. But the
year I graduated I had two job offers, which was twice as many as
you were supposed to have.
It came as a great shock to my father. "Why would anybody
pay you to know this stuff, which does not contribute to the growing
of any food of which I'm aware?" As you can see, I grew up on the
farm. That roots you in a tradition that allows you to see pretty
clearly, and detect pretty quickly, city slickers and charlatans of
various kinds who always think farmers are, after all, dumb or they
wouldn't be farming. Some of the wisest people I've ever met have
been sitting out there on the farm. Why and how do they get wise
- - not just knowledgeable, but wise? Well, I'll tell you. They sit
plowing. You can plow one field for weeks where I grew up, and you
do something with your mind during that time. You can't sleep, but
you can think. And you have time to sort out a lot of things. I think
all farmers are philosophers.
I think I was about five when I asked my father what made the
sun shine. He said, "Nobody knows." Well, I was greatly shocked,
and I can remember saying, "But Uncle Mason would know." And
he said, "No, Uncle Mason doesn't know either, because nobody
knows what makes the sun shine." I was in awe that here was
something that no one knew.
It turns out that was almost identically the time that Hans Bethe
first figured it out. He used to come to Los Alamos regularly every
year, and he still does occasionally. Sometimes I would work with
him on something, and when I would sit in the room with him I
would think, "Here is the man, the very first man in the history of
the world who understood what makes the sun shine, and he's right
here in this room." As a matter of fact, I still feel that kind of awe.
Because you see, to me that was vastly more important than how
much wheat we were going to get that summer. But, of course, I
was living on the wheat, so that was important too.
I regarded that question, "What makes the sun shine?" as just
awesome. My dad didn't realize that would change the history of
the world. I didn't realize it either, but I came along at just the right
time. When I got my degree in '55, I took the job that nobody
counted on me getting. That was the one at Los Alamos. The other
offer was for the vacancy in the Astronomy Department in Nash-
ville, Tennessee. That was the job that had been programmed for
me to get.
Carothers: Were these professors aware that Los Alamos was
interested in astronomers, or willing to hire them, or was this a
surprise?
Brownlee: They were aware of it, and unalterably opposed. It
turned out that a colleague also came to Los Alamos, and he and 1
were ostracized by the astronomical community for some years
because we had gone to Los Alamos against all the programming we
had. We were slated for these other jobs.
Carothers: What led a nice boy like you to fall in with this
bunch in New Mexico? You had an offer for a reputable job in
Tennessee.
Brownlee: Yes, but after 1 had done my thesis work on W Ursa
Majoris I had done a solar model, a model of the sun. I had worked
it out for one moment in time. Here is a model of what the sun was
- - never mind that it's evolving one minute every minute. This is
what it was, static. I did that the last year, and 1 was very intrigued
by that. There were a number of questions we couldn't answer;
things we just didn't know. Los Alamos was at that time the only
place in the world that I knew about where you could get your hands
on the center of a star, and have a chance to make observations on
it. And one of the things they at Los Alamos wanted to do was to
measure the opacity of materials in fireballs.
Now, that was exactly the kind of information I needed for
models of the sun, or for stars in general. It seemed a great oddity,
even to me - - of course, I was influenced by my father - - that
somebody would pay me to do an experiment on a fireball which
gave me exactly the information I needed for stars, which were
hopelessly out of reach. So, it seemed to me to be a very clever
623
thing to trick them into paying me to help do experiments in

fireballs. I didn't tell them that the real reason I was interested in
fireballs was because I wanted to understand something about
opacities - - which of course they didn't know anything about - -
because I was interested in stars, and wasn't really interested in
bombs.
Carothers: And you didn't realize they were tricking you into
studying opacities, which they needed to know for calculations
about their bombs.
Brownlee: I learned very quickly what they were doing, but
that was fine. It was parallel to what I wanted to do. And so, the
answer to your question is, they, at Los Alamos, were paying me to
do something I could do nowhere else in the world; namely, get my
hands on a real, honest-to-goodness stellar center.
And, not only did they pay me, they gave me vast sums of
money to do experiments. In 1956 we did the experiment called
Lacrosse. It was at Enewetak, forty kilotons, and we had forty lines
of sight, trying to measure the opacity of uranium, plus a lot of other
things. The opacity of aluminum, for instance, is very relevant to
models; there's lots of aluminum in the universe. So, this experi-
ment was forty lines of sight, forty kilotons, forty million dollars. A
fellow astronomer and I did that experiment. We were just given the
job, and nobody told us how much money we had. It was just, "Do
the experiment." When we got all through it had cost forty million,
but we didn't know that.
We got the opacity of uranium very nicely, but the number laid
around for some years until they finally got to the point where they
could use the real number for the opacity of uranium as measured
by experiment, and calculate things that had happened to them in
the past. We got the numbers, but they weren't used in weapon
design for years, because any time they put them in their codes
nothing came out right. So, you know the decision - - throw out the
truth. I want to say that's the first time I really recognized what
charlatans bomb designers were, but it's not true; I had sensed it
earlier.
Carter Broyles
SNL - Panel Member
Broyles: I was born in Eckman, West Virginia. I was in the

Army from 1942 to 1945. After that I went to the University of
Chattanooga, got my BS in 1948, and went from there to Vanderbilt,
where I got my Ph.D. in Physics in 1952.
I came to Sandia in 1952, in the Weapons Effects Department.
My first work with nuclear effects work was on Upshot-Knothole in
'55. From there I did various things, such as being the supervisor
ofthe Nuclear Burst Experiments Division, starting in 1957. I spent
some time on high altitude physics work, and managed the High
Altitude Physics Department starting in 1967.
When Marshmallow came along in 1962, I was the Scientific
Director, and 1 did that job, although they changed the name to
Scientific Advisor, on Midi Mist and Hudson Seal. Also on Cypress
625
and Camphor, the or Sandia shots. In 1972 I became the Director

of Field Engineering. This organization was responsible for conduct-
ing Sandia's underground nuclear test program, and was also
responsible for the the operation of the Tonapah Test Range. We
also supported programs like oil shale retorting, coal gasification,
and radioactive waste disposal programs.
I retired from Sandia in 1989, and I now have a position as
grandfather, babysitter, and general handyman.
Robert Campbell
Los Alamos — Test Director
I spent World War II as a civilian, and as a commissioned type

for the Navy at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. It started out with
mine location schemes, and ended up with a mine testing station on
the Bay of Fundy, west of Halifax. It was a nice place for that. It
had a 55 foot tide; you'd go along in the aircraft and drop stuff in
the water at high tide, and come by a few hours later with your
vehicle and drive right up to the things you'd dropped.
After World War II I stayed with NOL for roughly a year, and
that year was spent in closing up the station. I was the officer in
charge of the place at the end. Some of my friends had already made
the jump to Los Alamos. So, I learned of the place, and I made an
assumption which turned out to be incorrect. I was chafing, like a
lot of us did, with the rules, regulations, customs, traditions, of the
United States Navy. And the black shoe, brown shoe type of thing.
627
The AEC had been formed just a few months before, and I figured
that never in my lifetime could anything starting as new as the AEC,
and this Laboratory was kind of new, ever get as hidebound,
dogmatic, and bureaucratic as the United States Navy.
Well, I was wrong. What I found out rather quickly was that
for most of the things that you go through in Naval Regs, something
had happened somewhere, maybe years ago, but there was a reason
for it being that way. I very quickly found, in this new organization,
that they didn't have that history, but they still needed rules, so they
made them up. And a lot of times there was no reason for doing
it. Somebody just thought, "We'll do it this way." This place was
much more awkward than the Navy.
I was married when I came here, and my wife and I arrived in
Los Alamos on the 3rd of ]uly, 1947.1 guess the decision had been
made that this was going to be more or less a permanent place by
the time we got here, but the funds hadn't caught up with the
decision yet. We had to have a place to live, and all that was
available were the wartime four-foot modular - - because that's the
way a sheet of plywood comes - - structures of one sort or another.
We were assigned to a little house down on Canyon Road. Two little
bedrooms, a little living room with an oil stove in the middle of it
to heat the place, a little kitchen, a little bathroom - - no tub, just
a shower. I think, but I'm not sure, that building was about 32 feet
square. It was rather crowded.
I came here without a specific, "that's going to be your job",
type of thing. At the time it was awfully hard to get anybody to say
they'd come to Los Alamos, so they were taking almost any warm
body and making what they could of the people when they arrived.
I ended up in a place called R Site. These were people who were
doing hydrodynamic testing, as it's called today. I had the fun job
of trying to get two metal jets to collide in front of a spectroscope
to see what the ionization was.
After a few years at R Site, I don't know whether my feet got
itching or I could see there wasn't a hell of a lot of future for me,
I jumped. I got into the radiochemistry business for Greenhouse in
1951. Someone, and I think it was dear Edward (Teller), dropped
an idea that it would be interesting to know what a fireball looked
like as a function of time, from the inside. One of the games that
was thought of was to make a vessel which you would put out there,
engulf it in the fireball, and then close it at various and sundry times.
So, we were going to get grab samples inside the fireball.
The concept was to take a cylinder, hold that in the flow, and
on each end have some sort of valve or gate that would close quickly,
and so on. To do that we made ourselves some gate valves that were
to operate one time only. They were powder driven, about an inch
and a quarter thick, maybe four inches, five inches wide, in a body
about ten inches long. The gate went sliding across the opening and
jammed into a tapered seat, because they were not to bounce.
The shot was like ten kilotons on a three-hundred foot tower;
the collectors were out about fifty feet, so they were engulfed in the
fireball. We had some that were through-pipes, set horizontally
about six feet above the ground, and we had another variety that was
flush mounted. That was a tube closed on one end, with a valve on
top, and we took whatever got jammed in. We had five of each kind
on the event.
We went in and got the things out very quickly after the shot,
mucking about at the bottom of the tower a day or two after the
shot. And we did manage to get them out, but there were no
samples. They were clean. The part of it we didn't get right was
that we didn't get any flow through the damn things. They had sort
of a funnel type opening in a teardrop shaped casting, but there was
no flow, because it stagnated in the throat of the thing.
Of course, we weren't asked to repeat that experiment. So, I
jumped out again. A guy named John C. Clark had more or less
watched the criteria, and construction requirements, and every
other damn thing for the early phases of Greenhouse. But jack was
pulled out of that when the need for Ranger came along. He was
given the problem, essentially, of setting up the Ranger operation.
Ranger was in January 1951, and I was at Enewetak, setting up
the rad-chem samplers when Ranger was being conducted in Ne-
vada. So, I missed Ranger, because I was already in the field on
Greenhouse. Anyhow, they needed some sucker to start this
construction business, gather up the criteria, get it to the AscE, get
it back, get it approved, and all that sort of jazz. So I took that over
in August 1951, and that's how I got into what became the Test
Director business.
629
Rod Carroll
USGS — Geophysics
Carroll: I have a master's degree in mining and a bachelor's

degree in electrical engineering. 1 have a background in mining, and
I worked in geophysics in a private concern in the East. And, I
worked in mining in Arizona.
Carothers: So you're really a miner?
Carroll: Well, I got out of that business very rapidly. I took
a look around and said, "I'm not a glorified ditch digger." 1 prefered
a little more of what 1 thought were intellectual challenges. Mining
is a sad profession today. One of the country's tragedies today is
to travel the old copper belt from Bisbee up through Ajo, all the way
north to Montana, in Butte, and see the deterioration of an industry.
It's much more devastated than the steel industry in this country.
I thought I needed a broader contact with earth science. I had
worked in Mississippi, and I had worked on the Mississippi River,
and in the Virgin Islands, and I worked here and there, It was very
interesting work for a young man, but I suddenly realized I wasn't
getting any intellectual stimulation from the people in the group.
I had a good friend in the Survey who had been a professor of
mine in Missouri, and he called me up when I was in the Virgin
Islands. He also called me at my home in New York when I came
back, and asked if I wished to join the Survey. I said I certainly did.
He was in, at that time, what was called the Special Projects Branch.
It was the initiation of the Branch. So, I joined the GS in 1961,
Labor Day of 1961. I got off the plane in Denver, and there was
snow on the ground.
Chuck Dismukes
S-Cubed - - Codes and Calculations
I got my doctorate from UCLA in theoretical nuclear physics.

Then I went to work for Ted Taylor at General Atomics on
something called the Orion project, which was nuclear space
propulsion. The idea in Orion was to expel small nuclear explosions
out the back, and use the expanding gases to push a big plate, which
was coupled to a spaceship with shock absorbers. It was designed
to direct as much of the momentum as possible directly at the ship.
That's how I cut my teeth in learning about calculating
radiation coupled hydrodynamics in two dimensions, and got famil-
iar with the codes, which are really the basis for the codes we're still
using in the underground test business.
631
I was working in related areas at General Atomics when S-

Cubed was formed as a new company, as a spin-off from General
Atomics. Actually, 1 was one of the founders, although that's
probably an exaggeration of my role in the whole thing. I joined
them in 1967, about five months after they were officially formed.
Russ Duff
S-Cubed - - Panel Member
I went to the University of Michigan. I was fortunate enoug

as things turned out, to have been chosen for the Navy's V-12
program in 1944, and assigned to the University of Michigan as part
of an officer training program. My military "training" started at the
University of Michigan on July 1 st, 1944. I was a V-12 for a year,
then 1 transferred to NROTC, and I graduated in '47 with an
undergraduate degree in engineering physics, and that was the
extent of my Navy training and military service. In 1947 the Navy
was busily demobilizing, and what they did not need most was a
green ensign going to the fleet. So, they asked if I would please
accept assignment to the reserves. I graciously accepted their offer,
and went back to school in September.
633
I arranged to do a thesis in solid state physics. By this time I

had married, and we had one child, with another on the way. There
was the small matter of beans for the table. I had the GI BII, ninety
dollars a month, but it was not enough to support a family. There
was an opportunity to work in the shock-tube laboratory for Otto
LaPorte. He was a German physicist who had been involved in
solving the mystery of the iron spectrum - - the LaPorte selection
rules. It turned out that not only could I work on shock tubes and
get paid for it, but he was also perfectly happy for me to do thesis
work there. So, due to a pure accident of economics, I became a
hydrodynamicist, sort of, instead of a solid state physicist. Every-
thing seems to come from these minor beginnings.
My thesis subject was the use of real gases in a shock tube. All
early shock tube work was basically with air, or an ideal gas. 1 began
to look at the possibility of using gases with different indices of
refractions, and specific heat ratios. These things have been
investigated much more carefully in the years since, but we had very
limited instrumentation at that time. This was the dark ages - - the
earth hadn't yet quite cooled.
Carothers: Well, it had cooled, but the dinosaurs had not yet
appeared, except in some Departments where they had a few
dinosaur-like professors.
Exactly. I finished my thesis in early ' 5 1 . I applied to three
places, and I had three job offers. They were Sandia, in Albuquer-
que, Armor Research Foundation, in Chicago, and Los Alamos. The
Sandia folks paid the most, and Los Alamos paid the least. I went
to Los Alamos, because Los Alamos had attracted a large fraction
of the graduating class from Michigan for several years. It was an
interesting place to go, there were interesting things to do, and I
wanted to do them.
For the first five years at Los Alamos I was assigned to the GMX
division office, with the interesting title of Research Coordinator.
That was a job that had no authority and no responsibility, but it
paid, and it was fun. My job was to try to help the various
researchers who were scattered throughout the groups of the
division, and to suggest things that they might do that would be a
little more relevant to the Laboratory mission than what they were
doing.
This assignment as Research Coordinator went on for about

five years, and I began to suggest the desirability of a little more
order in the research activity of the division. In response they
suggested I move to GMX 7, and put together a small section doing
shock tube and gas detonation research. I did, and so we had a
group of six to ten people working there doing truiy fundamental
research on shock and detonation physics.
We had all of the support of a major Laboratory, had the
freedom to do anything we wanted to do, but the Laboratory really
didn't care whether we did it or we didn't. What we were doing was
actually irrelevant to the Laboratory's work, but they were willing
to support us. I came to realize that if my whole group ceased to
exist, fell off the face of the earth, or whatever, nobody in the
Laboratory would know or care until the following Friday when the
secretary called to ask what to put on the time cards.
In about 1961 I had an opportunity to go to Washington and
spend a year on a sabbatical with the Institute for Defense Analysis.
I took that opportunity, and was concerned with the early stages of
the arming of the South Vietnamese. And also with aspects of the
Defender program, which was an ABM system. And also with some
problems associated with very large yield explosions. The Russians
had recently fired a 60 or 70 megaton device. It was an interesting
year.
I came back to Los Alamos in '62 with some hope that there
would have been some reconsideration. There hadn't. Johnny
Foster, at Livermore, made a pitch to me. Why didn't I come there
and set up an equation of state group in the Physics Department,
working with Ted Merkle? Johnny can be a very persuasive salesman
when he wants to be, and I was sold.
I remember that he made an interesting comment to me. He
said, "You know, Los Alamos can beat Livermore at anything it
wants to do, anytime itwantstodoit. But it never will, because they
cannot marshal their resources. They will not put them together,
they will not overcome their internal inertia, to do that." That was
something that struck a responsive cord in me, because I had been
frustrated by the inefficient use of resources at LASL.
So, I came to Livermore, working for Ted Merkle. Ted died
shortly thereafter, and my activities were taken up in the Physics
Department with a thing called S Division, under Teller. Our job in
635
S was to look at theoretical and experimental equation of state

problems. We did a fair bit of work which was in direct support of
the Laboratory, and maintained a pretty active research activity
also.
We also did some diagnostic work in the field, and I was
impressed, and I said so at the time, by how little the diagnostic
people knew about things other than what they were immediately
concerned with. They didn't seem to care, and that was always a
frustration and an annoyance to me.
Well, after five years I again got the itch. I said, "Look, I came
here to do a particular job. That job seems to be going very well.
Okay, now what? What's the next challenge?" They said, "Hey,
you're doing real well. We really like what you're doing. Keep it
up." The same words I had heard at Los Alamos.
Then Mac Walsh, who had been a friend and an associate at Los
Alamos, called me from General Atomics and said, "We are setting
up a new company. It's called Systems, Science, and Software, and
we sure would like you to think about joining us." So, I came down
and met with Mac, and Bert Freeman, and a number of other people
that I'd known for a number of years, and was intrigued. It turns
out I was the first employee of S-Cubed who didn't come from
General Atomics.
Paul Fenske
Desert Research Institute - - Panel Member
1 was born in Ellenburger, Washington, May 15, 1925. My

family left there when 1 was four, and moved to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, where I attended grade school. We then moved to
Albert, South Dakota, where I attended high school. Then I got
drafted. I was eighteen the May before I graduated in 1943, and
in a small town like that there were not many guys who were free,
because a lot of the young people had farm labor deferments. So,
1 got out of high school, I knew the draft board was looming over
my shoulder, and I didn't know what to do.
I was kind of wandering around not doing anything, and my
mother, who was a tough lady said, "Well, you know, the School of
Mines starts in two weeks, down in Rapid City. Why don't you go
down there for the summer?" And so, the next thing I knew she put
me in the car, with my little suitcase in my hand, and drove me to
Selby, which was the county seat. That was also on the road which
connected Bismark and Pierre — Pierre being the capitol of South
Dakota and Bismark being the capitol of North Dakota. There was
a bus there, called the Jackrabbit Line, which ran down to Pierre
over this washboard gravel road. I got down to Pierre, and I had to
wait until two or three in the morning for the Chicago Northwestern
train to come through Pierre. I took that to Rapid City, took my
little suitcase, walked to the School of Mines, got registered, found
a place to stay, and there I was. It was the first time 1 had been away
from home. But you know — if you can't swim, throw you in the
water, and you learn how. I registered there as a physics major, and
I got drafted out of there into the ASTP program. 1 first got sent
down to Fort Benning, Georgia, which we used to call the Benning
School for Boys.
Carothers: I went through the parachute school at Fort
Benning, and 1 sure didn't think that was a school for boys.
Fenske: Well, the ASTP program was different. It was fairly
rigorous infantry draining. One of the reasons for it was that we had
a bunch of non-coms who weren't going to school, and they thought
this was a good time to take it out on all these college guys. We were
there about three months, and then the Army abandoned the ASTP
program. So, what to do with these guys? Well, they were in the
637
infantry school, so put them on a train and ship them out to the
infantry. And so 1 was in the infantry in Camp Van Doren,
Mississippi, which was the hell-hole of the South.
Carothers: Paul, that's what everybody says about wherever
they were.
Fenske: Yeah? Well, that's because they weren't at Camp Van
Doren. Camp Van Doren was it. I had some difficulty there where
I had to go to the hospital. While I was in the hospital they shipped
my outfit, the 63rd Infantry Division, over to Germany. When I got
out of the hospital I went to the Corps of Engineers, where I became
a construction equipment mechanic. From there they sent me to
the Mariannas Islands, where I fixed bulldozers and things like that.
When I was growing up in Wisconsin and South Dakota I never
realized that you didn't have to be cold in the winter. So, I was on
Guam, and Saipan, and then I had enough points to come home in
'46.
I went back to school, and ultimately graduated with a degree

in Geological Engineering, i got out of school in 1950, and so did
everybody else. The job market for engineers was not good; there
weren't really any positions available. I had some feelers from some
iron mining companies, but I didn't'know about the iron mining
business. I had some more GI bill left, and I had a brother-in-law
who was going to the University of Michigan. So, I went to visit my
sister, who was in Ann Arbor. I thought it was a pretty neat place,
so I decided to go back to school, to the University of Michigan.
I finished a masters in geology there, and then I was hired by
one of the subsidiaries of Mobil Oil Company, the Magnolia
Petroleum Company. At the time I was hired the Williston Basin in
North Dakota had just had a discovery well drilled, and so they sent
me out to do exploration there. I went out and ran around the
Badlands of North Dakota for a couple of summers. Magnolia really
didn't have any operation there; they drilled a few wildcats, but they
didn't have any production up there, and so they sort of bowed out
of the thing, and transferred me to Midland, Texas.
There, I just did a lot of well-site geology. I lost track of the
number of wells I shepherded down to paying production zones
after I got to 150 or so. From there I went to a small independent
in 1956, and I worked for them for about three years. Then in
1959 the oil industry was going to pot. You could import Arab oil,
and have it for a dollar a barrel, delivered on the dock. To produce
oil in West Texas cost us a minimum of two and a half a barrel. It
looked to me that the oil industry was going to pot; the Arab oil was
too cheap.
And so, I went back to school. I was kind of planning that
anyway, and I could see the oil industry was going down, and it was
getting to where it wasn't much fun anymore either. I went to the
University of Colorado and got a Ph.D. in Geology there, in the
summer of ' 6 3 . Working for that small company I had done fairly
well, so I had enough money for three and a half years at the
University of Colorado. Of course, at the end of that time I was flat
busted.
Then I borrowed some money, and went to Idaho State
University, and taught there. So, I was at Idaho State for a couple
of years, and it just didn't seem like they were going to do anything
for me, in the sense of increasing my pay, which was 6300 dollars
a year.
Carothers: Now Paul, academicians by and large, are not
highly paid people, but they get the advantages of the collegia!
atmosphere, the inspiration from the students - - they get all of those
things, and all of those things are tax free.
Well, Idaho State wasn't all that great that way either.
So then I went to Hazelton Nuclear Science Corporation in
Palo Alto, in 1965, and I got associated with DOE projects. The
company was Hazelton, then it became Isotopes, then it became
Teledyne Isotopes, and every time it changed names it went further
down the drain. But I had been associated with DOE projects, and
at that time they had a panel of consultants. George Maxey was on
it, and I had gotten pretty well acquainted with Maxey at that time.
He kept telling me I should come over to DRI. And, when it seemed
that Isotopes was running out of gas, I just went ahead and went over
the mountain. George Maxey was on the Panel when I came to work
for DRI in the latter part of August, 1971, and shortly after I was
attending Panel meetings. I wasn't a member or alternate; I had no
official status with the Panel. Two or three months later I became
Maxey's alternate. Then, in 1976, Maxey died, and I was made a
member of the Panel.
639
Bill Flangas
REECO - - Mining Superintendent
I was born and raised in this state, in Nevada, in a town called

Ely, in northern Nevada. I went to the Macky School of Mines, in
Reno, Nevada, and I'm a graduate mining engineer. So, I've really
stuck to Nevada, except when I was in the service. The U. S. Navy
doesn't operate in Nevada. My kids asked me, "What did you do
in the war?" I said, "I painted." They said, "What did you do when
you weren't painting?" and I said, "I thought about painting." I was
on a destroyer. It was great duty. In fact, I asked for destroyer duty.
Harry Truman deprived me of my first invasion when he
dropped the bomb in August, 1945. My relatively short naval
career (1945-1946) was a great learning experience, and I had the
honor of participating in the early occupation of Japan in the Fall
of 1945.
After the war, and after I got out of school, 1 worked for
Kennecott Copper in an underground copper mine. Then, early in
1958 I got a couple of calls suggesting that there was some work to
be done down here at the Nevada Test Site. My name had come up
through Mr. Reynolds, who was the owner-manager of Reynolds
Electric, who at that time was in New Mexico. He had been
hobnobbing in Rotary, or one of those clubs, with the people from
one of the Kennecott operations in New Mexico. He mentioned
that he was looking for a mining engineer.
It was through that trail I got contacted. I was asked two or
three times to come down to the Site and take a look at what was
going on. My answer was that I didn't want to get involved in any
radioactive work. Then time went on, and a couple of months later
I got another call. They said, "Look, without making any commit-
ments, will you come down? We're starting a tunnel, and we just
want you to spend a couple of days to help us get started, and you're
free to leave." So, I agreed to come down and take a look.
Reynolds was a construction company, and they were trying to
dig a tunnel with construction people. Obviously that didn't make
sense. I walked into E-tunnel, and they had managed to dig it in two
or three hundred feet. I don't how they got there. When I walked
in there it was just painfully obvious that they needed miners. So,
the question was put to me, "Do you know where there are some
miners?" Obviously I did. So, I made a number of calls, and started
rounding up some miners, and started putting that force together.
I came down here, to the Test Site, in May of '58 when the
Livermore Lab was digging E-tunnel, and they had a little activity
going in B-tunnel. It was at the time when they were first
considering taking the program underground. In the climate of the
times, there was just a great deal of anxiety on the Test Site, even
for those of us not connected with the nuclear business, over the
confrontation with the Soviets. It just became immediately appar-
ent. And so, I agreed to stay a few days and get that thing started.
And, by the time I got it started I got caught up in the excitement,
and here I am, thirty-six years later.
From myvery first days I grasped the national significance and
felt the dynamics of the NTS. I have had the good fortune to have
been a participant and member of this highly skilled and disciplined
641
cadre of scientific, professional, technical, government, and craft

personnel that in my opinion has no equal anywhere in the nation.
Although each of was individually focused in his own field of
responsibility in a rather complicated organizational structure,
objectives were very well met. This mission oriented and schedule
driven, "can-do" teams's outstanding successes were significant
factors in the outcome of the cold war. I am both grateful and proud
to have been involved.
Joe Hearst
LLNL - - Logging
I started out at Reed College, and I chose Reed college because

it had a combined program with MIT. My father was a businessman,
and he wanted me to take the MIT course in business and engineer-
ing administration. With a five year program I could go to a liberal
arts school first. Reed was the only liberal arts school that had this
arrangement with MIT, where you'd get a degree from each school,
that did not have compulsory chapel. I therefore chose Reed. Hater
learned it was one of the finest liberal arts schools in the country,
but that was not a consideration.
643
Reed was small; there were a thousand people, something like

that. Then I went to MIT, took my degree in business and
engineering administration, and decided I didn't like it.
From there I took a masters in physics at Boston University.
When I finished my masters it turned out I was the best graduate
student in their physics department. The other guy wasn't quite as
good. They recommended I go on for a Ph.D., which I subsequently
did, at Northwestern. And at Northwestern, which had a mediocre
physics department, I just barely squeaked through my qualifying
exam. I did a thesis in nuclear physics, and my big recollection at
Northwestern was, when I finished my Ph.D. there was some sort of
party to celebrate my degree. And there was a recorded message
from the department chairman, who couldn't be there. He said,
"Joe, I want you to remember that a second-rate physicist can be
a first-rate anything else." And so here I am.
I interviewed several places, and at that time the requirements
for being hired at the Lab were a Ph.D. in physics and vital signs. Be
vertical, breathe, have a heartbeat, and that was it. This was just
after Sputnik in 1959. And I did learn that the size of the offer I
got was inversely proportional to the amount of time I spent
interviewing. I went to Oak Ridge for two days, and they didn't give
me an offer. I went to Los Alamos for one day, and I forget what
happened, i came here for one day or less, and they offered me
$800 a month. At Boeing, where I never went at all, they just
phoned me and offered me more.
One reason I came here was, I saw this beautiful green valley.
I also went to Hanford. At Hanford they gave me a series of slides
of the area, and I came back and showed them to my wife. That was
the end of that; she said, "No !" I came here in something like
December, or maybe in the early spring. It was beautiful and green,
and I thought it was that way all the time. Nobody bothered to tell
me. So, when we drove out here and all the hills were brown, I
couldn't figure out what was going on. I said, "Well, when we get
to the Livermore valley it will be beautiful."
I ended up in B Division, and I first worked for a year doing
experimental physics, and I really liked that. I was designing ways
of doing photography, designing ways of doing pins, things like that.
Then I was put into this bomb design business, and for a while
I designed bombs, and I found that pretty boring. Those were the
days where you would make a bomb design, more or less by hand,
and you would then do some code calculations to see what the result
was. Every morning I would go in, and this was before Cal Comp,
and hand-plot the results of the calculations. Foster would come in
every now and then and look over my shoulder at some of the plots,
even though he was an Associate Director then. But my current
leader dictated every aspect of what we did; the colors in which we
plotted the scales, everything. He was the one person I've ever
worked for at the Lab whom I detested working for. He was a little
dictator and I had no freedom whatever.
I did write some codes to simplify my job and automate some
of the things I was doing. Writing codes was fun, and I enjoyed that.
1 came in one day, knowing nothing about programming, and went
to the guy who was in charge of the programming, and I said,
"What's this thing called FORTRAN?" He said, "Take this manual."
I took the manual home for the weekend and came back and wrote
a program. Nowadays there are courses in this, and I found you
could learn it in a weekend.
Carothers: Well, Joe, just remember, a second-rate physicist
can be a first-rate anything else.
Hearst: Right. Anyhow, I got unhappy with bomb design, and
didn't do very well at it. When the moratorium ended we got into
a rush, crash program. Eighteen day turnaround with designs - -
from hydro shot to hydro shot was eighteen days. 1 had to do the
calculations, do the ramrodding, make sure the parts were put
together correctly, all that sort of thing, and then design the next
one. That was okay. I think if 1 hadn't been working for the guy
I was working for I might have enjoyed it, but he was such a tyrant
that it was really not fun. And so I helped design another device for
awhile, then I went back to doing experimental work.
We were trying to do a series of experiments to look at the face
of a pit, as it imploded, and trying to see what was going on, in
detail. We were doing very fast photography. This was full time Site
300 work, and I enjoyed trying to make what were very high quality
measurements, for the time. That was fun. It was optical, with the
fastest shutters you could get. We had our own little bunker, and
I also still did my own code work development, which I liked.
645
1 liked doing these experiments, but as you may know, I'm

irreverent and like to tease people. And one of the people I liked
to tease was the guy who became the division leader. So, when he
became B Division Leader, and I insisted on staying in experimental
work rather than going back to bomb design, I was asked to leave
B Division. I went to K Division, after going the interview route
again, doing exactly the same thing that I had been fired from B
Division for doing, except now we were trying to develop experi-
mental methods to analyze the effects of shocks on rocks.
Dick Heckman
LLNL — Chemical Engineering
My stepfather was a regular in the Marine Corps, and I'm a

Marine brat. There was the war, and my high school time period was
during World War II, so we moved around a lot. I think I probably
attended some fourteen high schools. I spent a spring semester at
Mount Diablo Union High School in 1943, and my first interaction
with the Livermore site would have to be in late April or early May
in 1943. My stepfather said, "I'm going out to the Air Station.
Would you like to take the afternoon off?" Well, any high school
kid would, so I came out to Livermore, to the Air Station.
I did my lower division work at San Diego State, with the idea
of transferring up to UC Berkeley. I had a very fine chemistry prof
at my high school in Santa Barbara. Work with him convinced me
I wanted to be a chemical engineer, and I knew Berkeley had a good
chem engineering school.
-*,
647
I started in Berkeley was in '48, and graduated in June of

1950. My principal professors in the Chem Engineering Depart-
ment were Donald Hanson and Ted Vermuelen. I had decided to
take a job up at Hanford to work in the 200 process area, the old
Purex plant. When Vermuelen discovered I was interested in going
into the nuclear energy field, he said, "Gee, we've got some really
interesting things up on the Hill." He made me an offer, and so I
came up on the Hill, at Berkeley.
I came to work in July, the 5th or 6th, in 1 950. I had to laugh
looking at my Q clearance number. I suddenly realized I got my
clearance before I reached my twenty-first birthday. So, I've had
a Q clearance all of my, quote, adult life.
I basically worked under Vermuelen, did my undergraduate
work, and research project under him, and then went to work as his
chief staff guy on the Lab portion of the old Materials Testing
Accelerator, the MTA project, out at Livermore. Standard Oil had
been approached about setting up an operating company, California
Research and Development, for this big accelerator project. My
first assignment was to act as a liaison between the Standard Oil
subsidiary guys, California Research and Development people, and
the Laboratory.
Then, I had an interesting thing happen. On the annual
evaluation, Vermuelen called me in and said, "You've done good
work, and should you wish to stay here at the Laboratory, there's
no problem. However, being an engineer, your future really lies
with this engineering organization. And I've already called up your
new bosses and arranged for your interview." This was in July of
'51.
So, I quit the Lab, and transferred over to CRStD. I continued
to Finish up some of the cyclotron irradiation experiments in
Berkeley. Then I actually came out to this site, and my office was
in what was called Building 1 3, the old administration building. I
went to work for Bill Browning, in the radiation damage area.
I'd gotten married in December of '50, and we moved to
Livermore, into a house here, in December of ' 5 1 . We came out
in August to look around, and at that point Livermore was still the
original one square mile. The Jensen tract had not been annexed by
the city. It was still outside of the city limits, but they were in the
process of the annexation. Those houses were more money than we
could afford. I mean, they were actually asking ten thousand five
T"
hundred for those houses over there. That was just way too much
money. There were none of the flat-top duplexes to rent then, so
we had our choice of three houses in town. And so we bought over
on north K street, behind the Eagles Hall. Harold Moore was in the
process of building one, and when we looked at the house, and
agreed to buy it there were just some foundations there. Harold
finished that house, and we moved in December. When we moved
here there was definitely a lot of open space in the town.
On the MTA project, very early on it became clear that one of
the problems in the target area would be radiation damage. And so,
Vermuelen had directed my career off towards radiation damage
work. We went through a whole series of projects, but by the spring
of '53 it became very clear that CRscD was not going to make it. It
was just scuttlebutt, but it was very clear. I guess for me, in looking
back, the real time was when we realized there was going to be a
confrontation between the CRscD group and E. O. Lawrence, about
who was really directing things.
Well, of course, there was no question about that in Lawrence's
mind. The CRscD president, Fred something — I forget his name
— went off to Washington, left on a Monday. He was going off to
do battle at the AEC headquarters, and so I called up some of my
buddies in Berkeley and said, "Hey, this is going on. What do you
guys hear?" They laughed, and said, "It's all settled. E. O. left for
Washington on Friday, he came back Sunday, and it's all settled."
Don Hanson was getting involved in a lot of materials stuff over
on the Whitney project. I went to talk to him in May, and he said,
"Yeah, we've got a place for you, so if you want to come over, fine."
Well, I went to talk to my boss in CR&D, and my boss at CRstD told
me, "Hey, you're top of the line. The company will fold before you
go." So, it was very interesting when he called me in about a month
and a half later and said, "I've got some bad news for you. I've got
to lay you off." So, I jumped the fence then and came to work for
Don Hanson, here at the Lab in September of ' 5 3 .
Carothers: That must have been very convenient. You didn't
have to move. You didn't have to sell your house. You just went
in this gate instead of the other gate.
Heckman: It was more than just convenient, because believe
me, the guys who couldn't find jobs in the area were stuck with
making house payments, in some cases for three or four years,
because in a sense there was literally nothing out here, in Livermore.
649
Gary Higgins
LLNL - - Panel Member
I grew up on a farm. I went to a one-room school house in

Hartington, Nebraska; Branch Creek District 14. We had eight
people in the eighth grade. There was one teacher. No janitor. We
hauled our water from the farm next door in a bucket, and of course
the big boys had to do that, and put the wood in the furnace and get
it started in the morning. And then I went to a big school, the
unified high school. In Hartington there were about four hundred
students, and I think there were forty or fifty of them that made it
through senior year. Then, since I was only seventeen, and not
subject to the draft yet, I started college.
I started at Macalester College in 1944. The war was on and
I was not eighteen yet. My dad, who had lost an arm in the first
World War, said, "No way are you going to go in until you are old
enough. I'm not going to sign". I started out as if I were going to
attend a full year, but when March of '45 came 1 went around to
all the profs and I said, "I'm going to have to leave and go into the
service pretty quick." Most of them said, "Okay, your mid-term
averages are up, don't worry about taking the final. I'll give you the
grade, so you just stick it out until your birthday," which was May
19th, "gets here. If you get your call to go into the service,
whenever it is, I'll give you a grade and you won't get an incom-
plete."
I was discharged in the late summer of '46, early enough to
be able to register for school again in the fall. I missed twelve
months of school. I graduated in 1949 with majors in chemistry and
physics, and a minors in mathematics, German, and English litera-
ture, so I was not really anything.
That fall I entered the Department of Chemistry at U. C.
Berkeley. I was awarded a PhD in June of '52 after we had
discovered elements 99 and 100 in the debris recovered from the
Ivy-Mike nuclear test. I went directly to work for California
Research and Development, which was a subsidiary of Standard Oil.
but I found very quickly I was not suited for work for Standard Oil.
I terminated in November 1952, and restarted at the Laboratory,
then UCRL, as a radiochemist. I worked on nuclear explosion
phenomenology from 1958 until 1983, when I retired from active
programmatic work.
651
Jack House
Containment Project Manager, LANL
My family came to New Mexico when I was nine, and my

parents owned a ranch over in the mountains about twenty miles
west of Los Alamos from 1946 until 1968. So, I essentially grew
up in the neighborhood here, you might say.
I went to the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque,
where I got a bachelors degree in geology with basically a civil
engineering minor. UNM had set up a joint program with the
Geology and Civil Engineering Departments, and I took that pro-
gram. The subjects do to some degree fit together.
In the summer of 1966 I started working for Los Alamos, at
the Nevada Test Site, out in Jackass Flats, as part of the Rover
nuclear rocket engine program. The group I worked with was
designated as J-9, and we ran the R MAD building, where we did the
assembly and disassembly, remotely, of the nuclear rocket engines

in the Rover program. We lived in Las Vegas, and rode the bus 92
miles each way, each day out to the site.
After about a a year, not liking the bus ride or living in Las
Vegas very much, 1 started seeking opportunities back in Los
Alamos. An opportunity became available, and I relocated to Los
Alamos in 1967, still with the ]-9 group, but doing engineering
things back here for the Rover program. Then, in early 1970, Bill
Ogle, who was then the J-Division leader, decided to get out of the
Rover program support activities entirely. So he disbanded ]-9, as
we knew it then, and a number of us were sent scurrying looking for
other employment.
I didn't get reassigned, 1 had to go hunt up another job. And
so, 1 went to talk to my old friend Walt Wolff, who was the deputy
group leader of J-8, which did timing and firing. He said, "Yeah,
1 can use you." So, in March of 1970 1 went to work for J-8, and
became very well acquainted with the Nevada Test Site weapons
work, working with the timing and firing folks. 1 never actually
heard anything about containment until that December morning in
1970 when Baneberry vented.
653
Billy Hudson
LLNL - - Alternate Panel Member
I got the idea that I wanted to be a physicist because I wanted

to understand things. Why this, why that? When I was just a little
boy I asked these questions. Why? No one seemed to know very
many answers. Unfortunately, early in my career I realized that
physicists don't know the answers either, but by that time I was too
far along to turn back.
I grew up in Kansas, probably thirty or forty miles from where
Bob Brownlee grew up. We lived on relatively small farms, moving
from one farm to another when I was in high school, until I got into
college. But it was pretty much in the same general area around
Salina, Kansas, where I was born.
Carothers: Well, Brownlee, as you know, believes in old

farmers. He thinks they're the best kind of people you can have on'
something like the Panel.
Hudson: 1 think there's a reason for that. On the farm, as a
rule, you're too far from the hardware store to run and get a part
if something breaks. So, you make sure you have plenty of baling
wire and a pair of pliers. It's amazing what you can do with baling
wire and pliers.
When you get to be a physicist, 1 think in many ways you
continue doing the same thing. You don't use pliers anymore, and
you don't have the same kind of wire, but basically it's solving
problems the same way. Maybe that's why Bob likes the idea of a
farmer in containment, because many of the problems are of the
type which more closely resemble farm problems than big-science
problems.
After high school, I went to Bethany College, which is a small
Lutheran church school. It turned out that it was less than one mile
from where 1 lived, and so it was the obvious place to go to school.
In those days the tuition was relatively low, and 1 went to college for
about the same cost as 1 went to high school. 1 graduated from there
in what seems to me to be relatively recent times. Thatwasin 1958.
1 then went to Kansas State until January 1966. 1 was basically
a mix of teaching assistant and research associate, so 1 don't think
I went to school more than about half time.
My first thesis advisor was Bob McFarland, who worked at the
Livermore in the summer time, as part of the precursor to the fusion
program. He came back to Kansas State each fall with such glowing
reports of how great it was out here at the Lab that 1 think most of
his students came out here. There were six or eight students who
were in school at that time, and they all came out here.
So, I went to work for the Lab in 1966, and we moved to
Livermore. My clearance came along, and 1 was then invited to
interview many people at the Laboratory, which was a procedure
that it's really too bad had to go by the wayside a number of years
ago.
Carothers: That was an interesting process. The idea was that
you were hired to be a part of the physics staff, and as such you
would find an appropriate place in the Laboratory after you got your
655
clearance and could go talk to people in all the different areas.

That's very different from, "We have this job, and do you want this
job, and do you fit this job?"
Hudson: Yes. I talked to the people in almost every type of
work at the lab, including John Nuckolls, who was a group leader at
the time. I was especially interested in what he was doing, and I went
back a second time to talk to him, but I couldn't quite swallow the
idea of doing experiments on a computer. I was just a little bit too
much experimentally inclined. That just didn't seem like physics to
me. I've always enjoyed working with my hands. I didn't realize it
at the time, but it was always going to be somebody else's hands.
I considered several different places, but I homed in fairly
quickly on the Test Program, for a couple of reasons. For one thing,
it sounded as though they were doing what 1 considered bona fide
experimental work. It was more similar to what 1 had done in my
own little laboratory as a graduate student. And, at the time, they
gave me the feeling that they wanted me more, because I was
interested in experimental work, than some of the other areas did.
It seemed like a good fit, and I joined L Division. I think in
retrospect it was the best choice by a fair amount.
Evan Jenkins
USGS - - Alternate Panel Member
I went to the University of Colorado for my Bachelor's

although I came from Nebraska. My grandfather and my great
uncle were in the oil business in West Virginia, and we went bad
there the last time when 1 was in high school. The geology in the
Appalachians is much more visible than it is around Omaha, and 1
think that's where 1 got interested. The geology around Omaha,
Nebraska, is obscure. There's just a lot of junk there. It raises good
corn, but to a rock geologist that geology is junk. So, 1 came out
here to Colorado where, obviously, there's much more geology
exposed than even in the Appalachians. That was 1949.
I spent four and a half years at the University of Colorado, then
I went into the Army. After that 1 went to the University of Texas
for a master's degree, under Steve Clabaugh. He was, and is, a
fantastic man. I graduated in 1959, and then 1 went to work for an
657
oil service company in Houston for a year or so. They supplied

companies with drilling fluids, and the technology that goes along
with it.
Then Dub Swadely, a good friend of mine with whom 1 did my
thesis at the University of Texas, phoned me from Kentucky. He
was with the USGS, and he said, "Hey, we're hiring." So, I joined
the USGS in Kentucky, on the joint mapping project, doing the
whole state. At that time, when we finally finished, it was the most
thoroughly geologically mapped state in the country. And I suppose
that still holds, because of the money problems that have developed
since then.
I spent five years there, and my project chief in Kentucky
thought, "Well, you better get around and meet the Survey a little
bit." So, I came to the the central region here in Denver, and the
Nevada Test Site, and I really haven't gotten around to meet much
of the Survey since. So, since 1966 I have put my roots down on
the Test Site.
Gerry Johnson
LLL - - Test Director
I grew up in the Northwest, in Washington state, in the little

town of Spangle, just south of Spokane. While attending high school
1 happened to be one of those troublesome students, but 1 was a
good one. I had no trouble with the courses, and 1 had time to spare,
which 1 wasted by causing other people problems. But when 1 was
finishing up in high school the superintendent said, "Gerry, what
you have to do is go to college. Go right straight through and get
a Ph.D. in physics."
My first question was, "What is a Ph.D.?" They didn't teach
physics in high school there, but he knew 1 was interested in
scientific subjects. So, he volunteered one year to give me a lab
course, as a student of one, in physics. We had a little laboratory,
did little simple experiments, but it went very well. That was all the
physics 1 had before leaving high school.
In 1933 I enrolled in the State Normal School in Cheney,
Washington, and then entered Pullman as a junior. In those days no
659
one had any money, especially me. Many of us worked our way
through by doing odd jobs, and in my senior year I received a
teaching assistantship. I completed my undergraduate work in
1937, and then they gave me a a post-graduate teaching assistant-
ship; a half-time job. I stayed on two years, did a little laboratory
research, and received a masters degree in 1939.
From there I went to Berkeley, and it was while I was doing my
graduate work the war broke out. I'd been guided by a statistical
mechanics and kinetic theory professor, Paul Anderson, at Pullman,
to work for Leonard Loeb, which I did. A n d , if you worked for
Leonard Loeb, the story was that as a graduate student you always
knocked on his door before entering. As soon as the door opened
you were advised to say, "Goddamn the Radiation Laboratory."
Then you were permitted to enter. Loeb had no association with the
Lab, and in fact, he had developed a lot of resentment between
himself and the Lab. It was just a personality problem within the
Department.
Loeb was involved with the degaussing of ships, and he was a
reserve Commander or Captain, in the Navy. In the beginning none
of us took the war seriously. We were all anti-war, and Over the Hill
In October, if anybody were to try to draft us. But when France fell,
1 9 4 0 , we suddenly realized that there was going to be a war, and
we would be involved.
About that time, the summer of 1940, there were three of us
under Loeb, who advised us, "You fellows ought to take commis-
sions in the Volunteer Research Reserve," which was a Navy unit.
We allowed as how that might be a good thing, and so we took our
correspondence courses in Navy regulations, and ordnance, and
gunnery, and they commissioned all three of us. Towards the end
of 1940 Professor Loeb went on active duty, so there went my
thesis advisor. Soon after he reported, Loeb called me up and asked
how soon I could come on active duty.
I was well along on my research and had one prelim to go, an
oral, to qualify for a Ph.D., so I replied, " I ' d like to take my last oral
before coming. I think I could be ready around the first of February.
Any time after that I'll be prepared to join y o u . " Well, I passed that
oral; I suppose not with distinction, but I did.
At that stage of my life the Navy looked like a great adventure.
We had a different feeling at that time, after the war started, but
prior to the war we were no different than any other young people.
1 put my thesis on the shelf, and went on active duty in late February
or early March, 1941. 1 was assigned to the Naval Proving Ground,
which is south of Washington, on the Potomac. At that time it was
essentially a test range for experimental and acceptance tests of
armor and armor piercing projectiles, and for various other kinds of
ordnance, like mines. 1 became involved in armor and armor
penetration, which 1 continued for five years.
Specialists, like myself, in various technical areas, were sent to
various places, and essentially locked up for five years. We missed
the war, so to speak. They wouldn't let us enter combat areas. They
had the attitude that they shouldn't expose technical people to
combat, because of World War 1 experience. They usually referred
to Moseley being killed at Gallipoli.
1 thought it was a mistake at the time, and 1 still think it was a
mistake, because we didn't get a feel for the war. We were just
there, and problems would come in for us to work on. It's not the
same as getting associated with a combat operation and defining the
problems yourself. All of us kept trying to get out, at one time or
another, to get involved in something else, but they just wouldn't
let us. And the work we were doing was fairly pedestrian after we
got the experimental facilities and programs set up and going. After
the first two years it was nothing but routine. Shoot this bullet at
this armor, and make the measurements.
1 was in Washington until '46. Then 1 went back to Berkeley
and finished my thesis. I got my degree, and 1 concluded, "Now
what 1 want to do is get a teaching job and let ivy grow all over me."
So I did that. I heard of a teaching job at Pullman. 1 got hold
of my old friend Anderson, my former professor, and said, "I'm
looking around. I want a teaching job." He said, "Can you teach
physical metallurgy?" 1 replied, "Of course." I thought, "I can
certainly teach the theory because I've had physics of solids,
physical chemistry, and thermodynamics." But what was more to
the point, they wanted it to include a laboratory course in which
metallographic specimens were prepared. That is an art. I'd never
done anything like that. But I didn't tell them that, and I took the
job and went to work. I had a tough time polishing and etching
specimens, but I finally succeeded in getting some pictures. I felt
sorry for those students, but they were patient with me.
661
I really enjoyed teaching, and the students, and I was learning.

But then, after about two and a half years, I realized that here I was
teaching these people, or trying to, and I hadn't really done
anything in physics. I had no experience, except that little bit of
doing a thesis, and reading books and passing prelims - - I had no
substantial research experience. And I guess I was a little bored.
Pullman is pretty isolated after you've been any place else.
So, I went to the head of the department one day, and I said,
"This is not what I want to do. I don't know enough to teach. I want
to do some research for a while." And I followed that up at the
Brookhaven Laboratory, where I finally got a research assignment in
1949.
Then the Korean war broke out, and I volunteered to go back
on active duty again. I went to the Special Weapons Project in
Washington, and there I started to work on nuclear weapons. At the
end of that, which was two years, I returned to civilian life and
joined the Atomic Energy Commission, as a special assistant to Tom
Johnson, the Director of Research of the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion. There I worked on controlled fusion, using the same propa-
ganda lines we use today. First you show a picture of the rolling
waves in the ocean . . . "Think of that as gasoline, give us some
money, and we'll have it for you in twenty years." So, we should
have had it on line by 1970. We didn't quite make that.
While at the AEC, because I had the necessary weapons
clearances, I read the progress reports of Los Alamos and Livermore,
which described the nuclear weapons development programs. 1
thought, "Well, maybe one of those places would be an interesting
place to work." I concluded that the Livermore reports were more
imaginative. It was just that they were better writers, I guess, but
the way it came out to me it looked to be more exciting and more
interesting work. So I decided I wanted to go Livermore.
I was told that a man named Herb York, whoever he was, was
running the Laboratory, so I wrote him a letter, and said, "Look,
I've decided I want to work for you. What do I have to do, to do
it?" Not too much later 1 got a response from him, and an interwiew
was arranged. I didn't know what they wanted, or what they wanted
to know, but it turned out that they finally hired me. There were
about four hundred people at the Lab then, give or take a hundred.
Everybody knew everybody.
Carl Keller
Panel Member
I was a reactor physicist by training. 1 had been working at the

Connecticut Advanced Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, on the
Snap 50 reactor. They decided to close that down, and Pratt-
Whitney was going to make a jet engine expert of me. So 1 sent out
my resume, and 1 interviewed at Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Los
Alamos. And 1 accepted the lowest offer, which was from Los
Alamos. It required that I take a job, not with the people I
interviewed at Los Alamos for the full day, but with the people 1
interviewed for maybe a half an hour before Bob Brownlee had to
run off and catch a plane. And 1 had to change from the reactor
physicist business to the containment business as Bob Brownlee's
assistant. That was in 1966.
663
Actually, my first interest was in living in New Mexico. And

I had decided that the reactor business was declining. The big
companies were taking over most of the reactor research, and the
government was doing less and less. I had decided not to try really
hard to stay in reactor physics and reactor design, and I took the job
for the variety.
The nice thing about the reactor physics background was that
I had the nuclear physics I needed. In the reactor business I had
done neutron transport calculations, and other radiation transport
calculations. So, my background was in radiation transport. I had
not done any hydrodynamics calculations before, so the job was
initially highly instructive. Actually, in the containment field it has
always been that way. I was learning more than I was doing for many
years.
Joe Kennedy
Sandia Tunnel Closure Mechanisms
I came to Sandia in 1963, March of 1963. I had wended my

way through graduate school, like everybody else, I guess. I worked
for a time with the Lockheed Missile and Space Division in Palo Alto.
They paid for my masters degree in physics, at Berkeley. Then 1
went on to work for a Ph.D. in Physics at Lehigh University. 1 had
never been east of the Mississippi before that. My training there was
in solid state physics, but I never practiced solid state physics,
except for the first years.
Carothers: Well, Jerry, those tunnels are pretty solid state.
Kennedy: Condensed matter they call it now. That's far more
sophisticated than solid state.
665
I came directly to Sandia out of graduate school in 1963. My

wife is a physicist also; we were graduate students together, and she
said, "Well, it will be a nice place to stop for a year or so, before
we get back to California." And I said, "Right." And so we came
here, and we never quite did get away.
I came here, like a good many fresh Ph.D. students, into
research. That was frequently kind of an entry place for the new
Ph.D. at Sandia I came into a research group which did explosive
driven, high pressure physics. So I sat and wrote papers in that for
about the first five or six years that I was here.
Then some number of friends of mine kind of jumped over into
field test, full scale field test, and it was kind of right upstairs, in the
same building, and I got interested in it. And I had gotten tired of
writing papers, and wondering if anybody ever read them. Then a
friend who had gone to field test said, "We actually do stuff." That
appealed to me a lot, so I went there, and stayed there the rest of
my career here. The very first event I worked on was called Diesel
Train. It was a DNA event, and that was my introduction to tunnel
events.
Tom Kunkle
Los Alamos - - Panel Member
I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, and I

attended graduate school at the University of Hawaii. I chose
Hawaii because I was an astronomy major, and at the time the
Mauna Kea observatory was being built, and it had more square
inches of glass on the summit of the mountain than you could find
anywhere else.
Carothers: It seems a bit strange. There have been several
people at Los Alamos in the containment business who originally
were astonomers or astrophyicists. Here are people who've been
looking out at the infinite heavens, and now they're looking down
in the ground.
667
Well, there are some elements in common. In both cases you

have to deal remotely with your subject. There's very little
opportunity to learn directly the effects or the nature of what you're
dealing with. In one case, the underground nuclear tests are
inaccessible because of their extreme depths of burial; in the other,
the stars and other astronomical objects are inaccessible because of
their distance. So both use remote sensing.
In Hawaii I studied galaxies — the structure of galaxies, and
especially the material between the stars, the obscuring dust and
gas. My specialty is dust between the stars.
Carothers: Well, there you are. Now I see the connection with
the Test Site. There is a lot of dust there. When did you finish your
degree?
Well, I have two Ph.D.'s. I finished one in 1978 and one in
1979. They're two very different fields. I became something else,
as it were, nearly out of necessity. Having arrived in Hawaii to go
to graduate school in the fall of 1973, I discovered that there had
been an election the preceding year. The only precinct in the state
that voted against the incumbent governor, Mr. Burns, was the
university precinct. The university budget had suffered mightily
since that 1972 election, and there was no money for us, the
graduate students.
That left six of us, myself and five others, who had graduated
to go into astronomy, looking for employment to keep body and
soul together. I started doing statistics for a group over in the
College of Medicine. That group was interested in bubble nucle-
ation in supersaturated liquids and fluids. They were motivated by
an interest in diving medicine — the decompression problems which
are believed to be caused by the formation of bubbles in the tissues,
in the fluids of the body.
They were doing some very interesting lab experiments, but
they hadn't the least idea how to analyze them, or write up the
results. I had a fairly good idea how you might go about analyzing
and writing up the results, and I found I could learn how to handle
the glassware almost as good as the other medical students. And so,
within a year or two I was spending a lot of time doing that. It
became a regular hobby for me. That just progressed for a while,
and by and by I finished with a Ph.D. in diving medicine, or medical
physics as it's really known.
I still needed a job, and thatwas a problem. Many of us - - many

of us being the graduate students of the university - - were discussing
at the time about what will we be, now that we're grown-up. There
were, it seemed, two opportunities; one for university research, and
one for employment in the government, or government-sponsored
functions and laboratories.
Very few universities seemed to offer actual jobs. The
academic posts were transient, short term, not very well paid, and
without benefits. 1 considered a position at Washington University
in St. Louis, which would have been involved Fabre Perot spectros-
copy of various stellar objects. That would have been very
interesting, and probably could have been slowly developed into a
more secure faculty-type position, but it was short term. It would
have been up to me to try to develop it into something, and, gee,
it would have paid much less than the auto workers in the same city.
So, it didn't seem like too good an employment opportunity.
1 also discussed a science research fellowship at the Science
Research Consulate in Great Britain - - Edinborough, in this case. I
very seriously considered taking that position, which would have
offered me halftime a year in Hawaii at the National Infrared
Telescope - - the British Infrared Telescope, as it is known over here
— and then the other halftime in Edinborough, reducing the data.
That would have been quite an acceptable position. I very seriously
considered that.
But, I had replied to an ad which Eric Jones, who was then the
J-9 group leader, had run in Science magazine. He was looking for
someone to work in weapons effects at Los Alamos. 1 replied to
Eric's ad, and he had me come out and talk to him, and 1 liked the
position quite a bit. It involved a lot of theory and computations,
and statistical analysis of data bases. It was an interesting subject to
me, and the group was staffed largely with people I could get along
with quite well. There were physicists, astronomers, geologists, and
people I had already grown to know somewhat at the University of
Hawaii. And so 1 elected to take that position.
I interviewed here in August of 1979, and accepted the
position the following month. I showed up on April 13, 1980, 1
believe it was, for employment.
669
Joe Lacomb
DNA - - Panel Member
I was born in northern New York. My family was in construc-

tion, so we moved a lot. I went to high school numerous places —
Mesa, Arizona; Gold Hill, Oregon; Boulder, Montana, and a
number of places in northern New York. I graduated from West
Seattle.
After that I went to the School of Mines, at the University of
Montana. I was married, I had two children, and I was number one
on the draft list in Jefferson county. They called me up and said,
"Would you like to sign up for your ROTC deferment?" I said,
"That sounds like a reasonably good idea." So then I was stuck
doing ROTC until I got a commission. 1 got out of school in '55,
as a mining engineer.
Then I was in the Air Force, stationed at Alstrom, in Great

Falls, Montana, as a KC97 pilot, doing air refueling. When 1 got out
of the Air Force, I spent three years in business for myself, operating
a silver mine. We did pretty good for a while, but the problem was
that in the winter time the snow is fairly deep, and getting from town
to the mine at the Continental Divide was interesting at times. You
only get about six months of productive time per year. And, you
starve the rest of the year.
After that 1 went to work for what was then called Porter,
Urqhart, McQuery, and O'Brien. Porter, Urqhart, and McQuery
are all renowned civil engineers. O'Brien was a young partner.
They had the contract for doing the site exploration for the
Minuteman. I started with them up around Great Falls, and we did
two locations in North Dakota, then went to Missouri, and Lubbock,
Texas.
Finding the sites is like trying to site one of our tests, to a
degree. You have certain criteria. It can only be so close to a
school. Believe it or not, you can only be so close to a cemetery.
And you can only be so close to a town. And there is certain
topography you would prefer to have. You would like to try to get
in on a good blacktop road, if possible. You try to take all that into
account. And you could only have the sites within five miles of each
other. So, you tried find a place to cluster eleven sites - - ten silos
and one living quarters. First, you did a map study, and tried to
locate these sites in an area on the map, then you went out and drove
around and relocated them to fit what you found in the field.
Land use was another thing you tried to pay attention to. You
didn't want to pick a site in the middle of some guy's million dollar
orchard. You tried to pick fields. In North Dakota, most of the time
we were siting in the center of wheat fields. In Oklahoma we were
in cotton fields all the time.
After they were sited we went back and drilled to a hundred
and thirty feet. We took undisturbed samples every ten feet, and
took penetration samples every alternating ten feet, so we had
something every five feet. We provided that to the designers of the
silos for their structural design. Every site was drilled; any site that
made water had a pump test run on it. It was interesting work.
That's where I first got involved in soils and foundation work.
671
In Montana a lot of the silos were semi-dug. They were bucket

augured because most of that was soil. When they got to where they
had rock, they were mined. They were excavated by drill blasting
and typical shaft sinking methods. North Dakota was mostly glacial
fill with big chunks of shale. I mean big boulders - -1 couldn't believe
their size. Some of them had fifty to seventy-five foot dimensions.
Of course you can't see them. You just know that boulder was there
because of the drill pattern you'd put in. Glaciers are pretty big,
and they move big rocks.
My wife had moved from Montana to Vegas because my
parents were here. When 1 got through my last job with the sites,
I was sick of it. I was working seven days a week, twelve hours a day,
and that gets old after a while. So I just said, "I'm going home," and
I came to Vegas. I was here a week, and they wanted me to go down
to Vandenburg to drill some holes down there. I went down there
for two weeks, which lasted ten, and came back here.
The Nevada Testing Labs advertised for a soils engineer. I went
down and applied, got the job, and started working for them. I was
with them for two years.
From that I went up to Reno and managed a lab in Reno for
about a year and a half. Then they were changing hands, and I
decided to get out. So I was leaving, and I went around and talked
to my clients. I said, "I'm going going to be leaving, and this is
where I'm going to be. If there's anything that I've left undone, pick
up the phone and call me." I was really proud; I got fourteen job
offers in one day.
I got offered a job to be a project engineer on the remodeling
of Harrah's Club up in Reno, and I took that. My goal was to
become a project manager for big construction jobs like the Mirage
that's being built here - - places I could work for two or three years
on a big program, and then maybe go goof off for a year.
Then I got a call from Ken O'Brien saying he had the contract
with what was then DASA, in Albuquerque, and they needed a
mining engineer. I thought, "You know, as long as I've been out of
college, I've never worked as a mining engineer. I've worked in a
mine for myself, chased drill rigs, done a lot of other things, but I've
never been a mining engineer." So I said, "I'll take it." I went to
Albuquerque, and got there in September of '65. There was the
contract, but they didn't know what they wanted us to do. I used
to go berserk - - I'd go down the hall, door to door, trying to find
work, something to do, something to get involved in.
Then they needed a test group engineer for an event called
Double Play, but Jack Noyer had said he'd never have a SC@**%!
contractor as a test group engineer. Then he changed his mind, and
said, "Well, have him go do it." So 1 came out to the Test Site in
mid-December '65, as test group engineer on a tunnel test in Area
16.
673
Roy Miller
LLNL - - Drilling Superintendent
I have a BS in petroleum engineering, so I guess I'm a

petroleum engineer. There's several different fields of petroleum
engineering, and I happen to, for the most part, be interested in the
drilling phase of it.
I worked for EI Paso Natural Gas Company, in Farmington,
New Mexico, when I got out of college. For a short period of time
I worked in the Division Office in Salt Lake City, in a pipeline
department dealing with gasoline plants, and compressor stations,
and pipelines, and that sort of stuff. I worked for them for eight
years before I came to the Test Site. I couldn't wait to get back to
the drilling fields. So, in 1965 I went to work for Fenix and Sisson.
I worked for them until August, 1966, a very short period of time,
and then I went to work for the Lab.
It was surprising to me how much the hole drilling on the Test

Site was adapted from the oil fields. The holes just got bigger is all;
same equipment, same people.
675
Cliff Olsen
LLNL - - Panel Member
I went to high school in Sacramento. I'm a native Californian,

born in Placerville. The family wandered around Northern Califor-
nia. During the war we lived in Berkeley. In 1945 we moved to
Sacramento, and I stayed there. I went to high school in Sacra-
mento. UC Davis was just down the street, and so I ended up getting
both my bachelors and Ph.D. at Davis.
My degree is from the University of California, at Davis, and
I'm a physical chemist. I worked for Charlie Nash, who is still there
as one of the gray-haired types now. I was his first Ph.D. student,
or his first Ph.D. student who got a Ph.D.. He had just gotten out
of UCLA, and he had done work with Bill McMillan. I did my work
on exploding wires. You might ask, "What does that have to do with
chemistry?" All I can say is that a lot of people wondered that.

From that work I got a fair background in what, at that time, was
high-speed electronic diagnostic techniques.
1 got aimed here originally because Charlie Nash had a consult-
ing contract here, looking at exploding wires, and high speed
switching, and thing like that. The obvious connection is that such
things have something to do with detonators, and so forth. And so,
he had a little bit of money, and lo and behold, starting about 1958,
Livermore funded my graduate research. They gave us a nice high
speed capacitor bank, and some very nice oscilloscopes, which
would now be considered something for the Smithsonian.
So, it seemed logical to come down here and look around, and
they said, "Why don't you apply for a job?" So 1 did, and they took
me. I came to Livermore in 1961, and in only a couple of months
got my Q-clearance. These days that's absolutely amazing.
I ended up in N Division for a couple of years, before N
Division folded up. 1 worked for a while on samples of fissionable
materials and other things that we put in the Kukla and Fran
reactors, which were prompt burst reactors. One of the primary
things we were looking at was vulnerability, at that time.
With Kukla, which was a bare sphere, you could just put little
things in it. Fran was a little bigger, and was cylindrical, with a
cylindrical opening where you could put in a two dimensional
sample. The 2-D samples were a little more of challenge for the
calculators. We would instrument those, stuff them into the
reactor, and expose them to a radiation burst, which was primarily
neutrons.
Then, in '64, when N Division started to go the way of the
dodo bird I left, and a guy named ]im Carothers offered me a job
in L-Division. And, I took it. 1 started off as a reaction history
physicist on Club, and on Fade and Links I did the reaction history.
Then I moved on to project physicist, starting with Plaid, which was
a line-of-sight shot, but by the time Plaid was finally fired 1 was no
longer the project physicist - - I was in containment by the time it
leaked.
677
Paul Orkild
USGS - - Panel Member
! grew up in a little place called Northbrook, Illinois, north of

Chicago, and east, on the shoreline. I guess the way I got interested
in geology was that I just happened to be looking at rocks one day
when I was a wee one and decided that was something I'd like to do.
And, later I decided it was a lot better than working on construction,
pouring rocks into forms. I figured it was better to pick up the rocks
and describe them.
I went to school at the University of Illinois, from 1 946 to
1952. I was one of the lucky ones who went through ROTC officers
school. But, after they ruined my hearing with a bazooka they
decided they didn't need me. One of the classical demonstrations
for young officers was to show how a bazooka worked, in the
classroom. The sergeant demonstrating the bazooka held it up and
said, "This is how you fire it." It went off, and it went out right
through the wall. Luckily, it missed everybody. But now I wear
hearing aids in both ears, and the whole class of 36 people were hard
of hearing after that, I think. It was very interesting, but I decided
right then and there that was not the place for me. It made for a
short career.
I stayed in school and finally graduated. After doing graduate
work in '52, I finally got very hungry, and the USGS had a very
lucrative offer, so I went to work. I joined the USGS to work in
Alaska, but I never saw Alaska. I ended up working on the Colorado
plateau looking for uranium. Those were the days when they
thought all the uranium was in the Belgian Congo and up in Canada,
and the US didn't have any.
There was an award program for prospectors. There wasn't
anything like that for us, even though they used our maps. One of
our jobs was to produce photo-geologic maps of the Colorado
plateau, which we were doing. The Survey didn't make any money
selling those, but the blueprint companies that sold them made
fortunes, literally. And the guys who bought the maps and found
uranium, they made fortunes. They bought the maps for seventy-
five cents. It cost us probably ten thousand dollars to make them.
At that time we were working in what we called the photo-

geology section, in Washington, from 1952 to 1956. Photo-
geology is where you analyze aerial pictures that were taken of
various areas, and make geologic maps based on looking at them,
and inspecting them with stereoscopes, and so on. You infer the
kind of rocks there are by looking at a picture, the various tones and
colors. And being very clever, of course.
We used colored photographs, which were very primitive at
that time, but they were useful, and black and white photos. Then
we would go out into the field, and field check what we were looking
at so we'd have a data base to work from in identifying the various
rock units. It was a very interesting approach. Many of the old time
field geologists thought it was heresy that we could look at a photo
and make a geologic map.
Anyway, in 19581 got involved the mapping of the Test Site,
where they wanted to do the west part, using photo-geology
mapping. Then they formed the Special Project Branch for Test Site
work, and it's still here today.
679
Jim Page
LLNL - - Test Director
My first exposure to the Lab was as a summer employee, back

in the summer of 1961. I came into Mechanical Engineering and
spent three months working on projects in the high pressure
laboratory. Then I went back to school and finished up my Masters
degree in 1962, at Cornell.
After that I came back into Mechanical Engineering, in what
was then Device Division, and went to work on some of the very
early stuff that was being done in weapons control. I spent a couple
of years working there, and then I went back into device work, and
did about a year and a half of auxiliary systems work. Then the
Department decided to form an engineering division that would pull
all the test work together, into something called NTED — the
Nuclear Test Engineering Division. I joined that division the day it
was formed, and was in the containment group under Palmer House.
1 left that engineering group in 1972, when 1 took a one year

assignment at Oak Ridge, in Y-12, in their engineering organization
back there. I did a number of things there. I worked in their special
orders group, which was the group that deals with customers like the
Laboratory. I worked in their engineering organization for a while.
It's an facilities type engineering group that worries about the type
of equipment, and where they put it, and how it operates. I got a
good look at how the whole outfit works. There must have been a
half dozen people from here who went there on an assignment like
that, and a half dozen people from the other parts of the complex
who came here. 1 found it to be a very interesting year.
When I came back 1 spent about seven years doing device
engineering for events. Then I got involved in the W-79 as the the
project engineer. It was in Phase 4, so it was mostly a production
engineering job. From the W-79 work I went back to NTED as the
deputy division leader, and 1 spent about eight years doing that,
which, of course, had a heavy focus on the engineering that was
done for the Test Program.
I left that job and went over to the Test Program, working in
the field operations activities, doing planning and some of the
management of elements of the program. From that assignment it
just sort of transitioned into a Test Director assignment.
681
Dan Patch
Pacifica Technology - - Codes, Calculations
I got a bachelor's and master's degree in mechanical engineer-

ing at the University of Minnesota. I started in ' 6 1 , and got done
with that in '67. Nobody told me you got a master's degree
automatically if you went through a Ph.D. program. U of M was an
old timey school, and they had a five year engineering program. I
got into a fast track program that said we could get out in four years
if we would be good scouts and promise to stick around for a couple
of more, and that's kind of what I did.
Then I came to California to go to school at the University of
California, San Diego in the AMES Department, which was Applied
Mechanics and Engineering Sciences. It had originally been the
Aerospace Department, but the aerospace industry went kaphooy
in about the middle sixties, so they kept the same letters, but
changed the name of the department.
I came to San Diego because 1 wanted to get out of the snow,

and because my advisor said that there was a new engineering school
out here; they hadn't graduated a complete class yet when 1 came
out. I think they had been in operation about three years. It was
hard to tell what kind of a reputation they had, but the UC system
had a good reputation, and they had some very fine faculty
members. They had recruited good faculty, so 1 thought, "What the
heck. I'd really like to see what the West Coast looks like, and give
this a try."
It took a long time, but I got a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics.
That seemed to be a broad enough title to cover all sins. It took five
years, plus 1 stayed on a little longer as a post-doc because my
advisor took his sabbatical, and he needed somebody to keep track
of his grad students. So I stuck around for an extra nine months.
I knew, through a number of strange connections, some of the
people who worked at Science, Systems, and Software. I had known
some of these people for several years. It seemed like a nice bunch
of people, and an interesting place to work. I thought it would be
really nice if I could get into S-Cubed, but I sent resumes out all
over, to General Atomics, the Navy, and out of town to various
places. Interestingly enough, one of the places I sent my application
to was SAIC, at the time. The two places were very comparable.
They spun off from GA at about the same time, and they were both
about the same size, but because I knew the S-Cubed people, and
I had kind of an inkling of what the corporate culture was like I
thought it would be nice if I was offered a job there. Well, I was.
I would guess that S-Cubed was about a hundred and fifty
people at that time. I interviewed Chuck Dismukes, and Jerry Kent.
Jerry was the late-time containment guy, and Chuck was what Chuck
was, and still is, of course. Jerry offered me a job, and I didn't quite
know what I was getting into, but it sure sounded like what I was
looking for. I've never really looked back from there, in a way. I
worked for Jerry for two years, and then Jerry left S-Cubed, with a
couple of other people - - Bob Bjork and Mike Giddings, and a little
later Bob Allen. Those four guys left and formed Pacifica Technol-
ogy as a little bitty company. After they had thrashed around for
a year or so they were in need of some help, because they were doing
pretty well. Jerry had continued on with part of the containment
work, part of it. We really in some sense split it with S-Cubed at the
time.
683
Ed Peterson
S-Cubed - - Panel Member
I was born in northern Wisconsin and have moved many places

since then. I have a bachelor's and master's degree in Mechanical
Engineering from the University of Washington. I worked at Boeing
for a while after I had a bachelor's degree, mostly on airframes.
After I received a master's degree I worked for Ford Aerospace in
Newport Beach, not a long time but a few years, on rocket engines
and things like that. I interacted with numbers of people who had
doctor's degrees, and my personal view was that a Ph.D. was sort of
a union card that let you do some of the more interesting work that
you get locked out of if you don't have one. They don't pick people
to do work because they're smart, and good. The Ph.D. is sort of
a union card, and that's the basic reason I went back to school. It's
sort of the circumstances of life. It was probably worth it. Who
knows, but it was interesting.
So, I have a Ph.D. in Engineering from UC Berkeley. I received

that in 1968. Following that 1 taught at the University of Minnesota
for four years. In the sixties there weren't enough Ph.D.s to go
around, but by 1970 or '71 the market was glutted. For example,
at the University of Minnesota we had lost maybe half our students,
and there were a half dozen assistant professors. It didn't take too
much foresight to see the writing on the wall.
I had worked in Newport Beach, which is sixty miles up the
road from here. Now, nothing against Minnesota - - it's very nice,
the people are very nice, and all that, but it is not nearly as warm,
and they aren't near nice beaches. So, 1 was looking around for
some place between the Mexican border and Newport Beach, and
missed it by five miles.
A fellow named Gary Schneyer, whom I had gone through
graduate school with, had by pure chance found S-Cubed. 1
happened to talk to him, came here and interviewed. My bachelor's
and master's degrees are in Mechanical Engineering, but the Ph.D.
is in Engineering. In going through Berkeley in the department 1 did,
one takes a major, which for me was fluid mechanics, and two
minors. Mine were physics and mathematics, so it wasn't really
disassociated from the type of things they do here. They made an
offer, and 1 decided to go to work here. The company was very small
at that time. So, 1 came here in 1972. And the principal reason
was because it was San Diego. It may not be a good reason, but that
was the reason I did. The person who really hired me was Chuck
Dismukes, and the people here were interested in front ends at the
time, and plasma flow in the pipes. It was really a fluid mechanics
type problem that they were most interested in.
There was another person here, who didn't hire me, that 1
ended up working with some in aerodynamics. He was doing truck
aerodynamics and things like that, and 1 had done some work in
aerodynamics. If you look at trucks today, you will see these new
aerodynamic trucks. The one that's put out by Kenworth now is
almost identical to one that we designed for Freightliner about ten
years ago. The new trucks have the whole front end, including the
fenders, the cab top, and everything designed as a complete
aerodynamic unit. In the very new ones the aerodynamics goes all
the way down to the bumpers, and along the sides. I ended up doing
a reasonable amount of work on that. All engineering problems
685
from many standpoints are the same. They're all a little different,
but they all have a lot of similarities. The work on the trucks was
very technical, and a lot of fun.
A lot of the people that are in containment really only work in
one area, but there are others of us that have done other things.
John Rambo
LLNL - - Codes, Calulations
1 graduated from the University of Portland in June of 1963,

and a slight depression was going on at that time. I had been looking
for a job for about six months when some interviewers from the
Nevada Test Site came to Portland. So I went down, and they were
looking for some technical people. 1 said, "I'm a physicist, but I
certainly would be willing to do most anything. 1 really would like
a job, and I'm interested in working for the Laboratory." They said
they were looking for a physicist, they just hadn't advertized in the
newspaper. I continued to write them letters that I was still
interested, and at the same time I was also possibly going to hire on
at Bremerton, with the Naval shipyard.
It was rather odd. I had an interview at Bremerton that was
really quite extensive. I was really put to the carpet, technically,
and there were a great deal of questions from the Navy people. I
687
really felt uptight during the whole interview. About that time I got
to go down to the Nevada Test Site, for an interview down there.
They showed me around the Test Site, took me up to CP-1, and as
we were driving back one of the physicists, Bill King, the head of
Health and Safety, said, "You know all about radiation and that sort
of thing?" I said, "Yes," and that was about the extent of the
interview.
I proceeded to be very interested in joining the Laboratory in
Nevada, and I was hired on by John Ellis, who was then in charge
of a small group developing, as a group, how to measure slifer yields
for the nuclear test program. I came to work in November of 1963.
I lived in Las Vegas, and worked at the Test Site for five years.
I came in as the physicist who would analyze the slifer data, and
then proceed to write reports telling people how the devices went
in terms of yield. Things were quite different during those days.
Some of my first visits out in the field involved looking at how the
engineering construction people, Joe Snyder and Dick Hunter, sat
in a small trailer and directed the entire operation from that trailer.
We were shooting a shot every week or so at that time. That's
something that 1 doubt we could do today. It was rather phenom-
enal to see how they would get all this activity going just from that
one trailer. People would show up, and they would tell them where
they were to go. They were on the net a lot of the time, and it was
just that very small operation that was doing the whole thing.
Norton Rimer
S-Cubed - - Codes, Calculation
I got my undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. degrees at City

College of New York. I started as a civil engineer, then obtained a
masters in hydraulics, and a Ph.D. in plasma physics. From
hydraulics to plasma physics was a real switch. Most of the people
were doing experimental theses. 1 was more interested in the
computational aspects, coming from fluid mechanics, where I was
doing computational fluid mechanics. That change to plasma
physics meant taking a lot of new courses, a lot of physics depart-
ment courses that I hadn't taken.
I finally turned in the document for my degree in 1972, and
I came here, to S-Cubed in 1973. Actually, I had been teaching at
the University since 1967. I was in no hurry to get out of there,
because I was interested in teaching. I loved college teaching, but
it was recession time. 1 must have applied to 200 universities,
689
including every one in Hawaii and Florida - - I'm a beach person. I

think I got about ten or fifteen "no" responses, and two interviews,
one of which accepted me. That was a junior college, and I wasn't
very interested in that.
When I got here Jerry Kent had just taken over Russ Duff's late-
time containment contract. He needed help out here, so he called
me up, and I came out for an interview, and they hired me. Partially
it was to work for him, and partially to work on plasma physics. I
spent about five years writing some of the plasma physics codes that
they used then. I was working part-time on containment in those
days. Nine months after I was hired Jerry left and formed Pac Tech.
Four or five months before that he asked me to go with him, but I
like this company. I felt I had a lot to learn from the people here,
and I decided to stay.
So, I've been here since September ' 7 3 . But I'm leaving S-
Cubed as an employee right after I come back from vacation. I'm
retiring, but I'll be a consultant; I have a half-time commitment. So,
I guess I won't get my twenty year watch. I'll stick to the business
at least as long as the people I can work with stay around. If
someone strange comes in that's difficult to deal with, I probably
will just cut out completely.
f'.v . .• V
Byron Ristvet
DNA - - Panel Member
1 was born and raised in Puget Sound country, in Tacoma,

Washington. Undergraduate school was at the University of Puget
Sound, where 1 got a Bachelor of Science in Geology, with minors
in chemistry, physics, and aerospace studies.
I always liked rocks, and I had an aunt and uncle who were avid
gemologists. They got me interested in it. And I've always been an
outdoorsy person. 1 used to like to go out camping, roughing it, and
all that. 1 still do it occasionally, but I've gotten to where a motel
is roughing it. In 1969 and 1970 I was a geologist with the Keivel
Mining Group, which is Canada's largest Canadian-owned mining
firm. I was an exploration geologist the first summer, and an
exploration geology manager the next summer. I guess working a
couple of summers in remote northern Canada kind of gets you out
of the camping experience.
691
They were long summers and we made good money. There I

was in Canada, with a permanent work visa, which I still own, and
I still have a Canadian social security card. The Vietnam war was
raging, and it was hard to come back. I originally wanted to go to
the University of Calgary, since I was on an educational delay from
active duty in the Air Force. They were all worried, and said, "You
can't go to Canada. You might not come back." Nobody knew I
already had a permanent work visa.
Then I went to Northwestern University for graduate school
and received a Ph.D. in geology, with the emphasis on low-
temperature aqueous geochemistry. I left Northwestern in 1973.
I was prematurely called to active duty by the Air Force, so I did not
have my thesis even started, as far as the writing. In fact, until the
day I left to drive to Kirtland via my home in Tacoma, I was doing
lab work. That was about an eight month premature extraction from
the University. I went to Kirtland to what was then the Air Force
Weapons Lab. I was originally to go there to do environmental
chemistry work, which was waste water problems. I got to Kirtland,
and in a few days time, three days exactly after I in-processed, I was
on a plane to Enewetak, where I got involved with trying to
understand the Pacific nuclear craters.
Off and on, that took until 1985 to finally resolve, with many,
many trips and about seven hundred days out there. I think the
longest trip I took was nine to nine and a half weeks. I think we did
a very good job out there, in understanding that these craters really
were small. It was all these late-time liquifaction related processes
that made them become so large and shallow.
My first visit to the Test Site was in 1974, where I assisted in
emptying ejecta collection pans on the pre-Mine Throw event,
which was a hundred and twenty ton nitro-methane shot out on
Yucca Lake. It was a cratering shot, and the ejecta collection pans
were to collect whatever came down where they were.
1 was with the Air Force Weapons Lab at that time. I really got
in on the original Enewetak project when it was a DNA funded
project to look at all the explorations of the craters. 1 was also
involved with DNA on the Minuteman upgrade program, and the
silo upgrade program, and a number of other programs. We were
working very closely with the shock physics folks, and to some
extent the test folks. The characterization of the islands started in
1977, when 1 was still on active duty, and I was involved as a

technical advisor there. It was in 1977 that I decided I really didn't
want to stay in the Air Force on active duty, but I continued on as
a reservist, even until today.
I was looking then for a job, and originally 1 had planned to go
to an oil company, a research and development organization. 1 had
completed my Ph.D. while on active duty. 1 was seriously looking
at joining the Chevron Research Corporation, but a few things
changed my mind right at the last minute. They had to do a little
bit with salary and the cost of living in southern California, and the
fact that my wife was pregnant, and she had a good job in
Albuquerque, and her family is in Albuquerque, and there was this
geophysicist job open over at DNA.
So, then 1 was a civilian employee at DNA. I continued on as
a reservist at the Weapons Lab, primarily doing environmental
impact analysis, which 1 still do today. I started in October 1977,
and I worked at DNA as the geologist-geophysicist for six years.
Then I left DNA to go to S-Cubed, and the purpose for that was so
I could be the technical director of the Pacific Enewetak Atoll Crater
Exploration. That was finally the realization of what we had wanted
to do, which was to drill the craters, which we did very, very
successfully.
It was funny. If I wanted to do that, even though it was a DNA
sponsored program, I had to leave DNA because my duties in the
underground test program would have prohibited me from devoting
full time to a program that was very near and dear to my heart at
the time. And so I went to S-Cubed with the intention of probably
coming back to DNA as a government employee. I was at S-Cubed
a little over five years, and then I returned to DNA in 1988, as the
chief of the containment technical division.
693
Bernie Roth
LLNL — Test Director
I'm a mechanical engineer. I graduated from San Diego State

College in 1959, and stayed in that general area for five or six years.
I came out of the aerospace industry, where I had spent eight years
at several different jobs for several different aerospace companies.
I had three jobs in San Diego, and then one in Connecticut. I worked
on the Atlas program in San Diego for General Dynamics, in the
astronautics division. I had two different jobs there. I also had a
job at Ryan Aeronautical for a short period of time in San Diego.
That was in anticipation of a contract that never developed. The
custom of the time, and maybe is still, is that there is feast and
famine. You're hired and fired at will in the aerospace industry.
Then my last aerospace job was with United Aircraft in the Hamilton
Standard Division in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
After those seven or eight years in aerospace I decided that it

was too transient a life, and I wanted to look for something a little
more secure. The other part of that story was that I didn't want to
live on the East Coast. 1 had been there for a couple of years, and
decided that I'd like to go back to the West Coast.
And so, how did I get here? One September or October
weekend there was an advertisement in the local paper that the
Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California was interviewing for
all sorts of people. I had already decided that 1 was going to leave
United Aircraft, and had talked to people like Lockheed and so on.
So I thought, "Gee, What is this outfit?" And 1 decided I would go
down and at least talk to them.
So, I proceeded with the interview process, and was invited out
for an interview at Livermore. That progressed through the various
administrative requirements to a job that I started, 1 believe, on the
20th of June, in 1967. I got hired into what at that time was the
Nuclear Test Engineering Division.
I was almost immediately assigned to an event called Hupmo-
bile. All this was new to me, and I didn't know what to expect. 1
think it was six or seven months before that event was fired. At the
time I was very new to the Laboratory, and that was my first test.
I didn't realize how complicated that shot was at the time. I just
thought they did that all the time. Then I just went on from there
to one event after another, in the capacity of what was then called,
and is presently called, the diagnostic engineer.
Things just progressed from there. 1 spent probably four or five
years as a diagnostic engineer, and then a position became available
in the readiness group. That program ended about two years after
I became associated with it.
I jumped from there to the laser program for a couple of years.
But, 1 guess the Test Program had become ingrained enough in my
interests that I decided I liked it better back in the Test Program.
And so, I came back into the diagnostic group, and took a position
as a group leader, which happened to be available. We Fielded a
number of events, I advanced to section leader of the entire
diagnostics section in NTED. 1 went from there to become a device
systems engineer, which job 1 had for seven or eight years, and then
became a Test Director, which is what I am now.
695
Tom Scolman
LANL - - Test Director
I came direct to Los Alamos in 1956, after getting a Ph.D. in

experimental physics at the University of Minnesota. I came to Los
Alamos for several reasons. One, I had several friends I had been
with in graduate school who had come to Los Alamos, and they were
very high on Los Alamos, not only as a place to work but as a place
to live. I'm a small town boy. I wasn't particularly anxious to go
to a large city, and so I found Los Alamos very appealing, and the
work was challenging and interesting.
When I came to work I went to work for the weapons division,
which in those days was responsible for the engineering design and
production of weapons, both for stockpile and for testing. I worked
with a group that was largely responsible for interfacing between
designers and engineers, and my involvement with Test was through
the fact that this particular group had the responsibility of monitor-
ing and certifying the gas handling for test devices. With this 1 was
involved with the Hardtack operations, both in the Pacific and later
when we came back to Nevada, although I was not part of the test
organization, per se.
It wasn't a bad life, out in the Pacific, if you didn't mind being
away from where you lived for a while. That certainly was the most
negative side of it. I think in many ways it was harder on the families
back here than it was on the participants in the field. It turns out
the group I was in was not engaged in the construction in the field,
so as a result we did not have to go out and spend six months in the
field for every operation, as much of] Division, the test division, did
in those days. For example, on Hardtack Phase 1, if 1 remember
right, I spent probably not more than like six weeks at Enewetak.
We did, as some people remember, then come back and do
Hardtack Phase II, which was very different. I remember one time
where we were out arming a device, preparing it to go up on a
balloon so it could be fired at dawn. While we were out arming,
three shots were fired within probably five miles of where we were.
Carothers: I've talked with people at Livermore, and the things
they have said about that operation are hard to believe these days.
Bob Petrie said that they once went out, got the carpenter foreman,
and said, "We want a tower. How high can you make it by tomorrow
night? Can you make it about this high, and about that wide? And,
we'll need some steps." And Walt Arnold told me, "I remember
carrying a device up those stairs." I said, "Aw, come on." Do you
believe that, Tom?
Scolman: Yes I do. I never carried a device up the stairs, but
I did carry one on my lap, in the backseat of a sedan, out to the zero
point.
It must have been the fall of '62 that I got into ] Division. I
had become closely acquainted with Bob Campbell during our
involvement in the operations, and I said, "Is there anything in J
Division that might be interesting?" He suggested that I look at their
timing and firing group, which was J-8. It wasn't really in line with
my background, but it was sufficiently interesting, and had some
involvement with the field activity. I enjoyed the testing business.
I like to go out and do things, and the test people do things.
697
I worked in the timing and firing organization until about '65

or '66. Then we started branching out, doing things other than tests
at the Nevada Test Site. We got involved with some of the
Plowshare operations. We got involved with the first shots on
Amchitka, and then there was a need for another Test Director.
Initially, Bill Ogle asked me to come to the division office and work
with Bob Campbell and Bob Newman, as a Test Director. What was
supposed to be initially a one year assignment turned out to be the
rest of my career at the Laboratory.
Carl Smith
SNL - - Shock Physics
My family were mechanical engineers, and there seemed to be,

at first, the typical role of following my father and older brother.
But it turned out that there was a physics course in high school, with
a very good teacher who steered me in that direction.
I started at a little college in Indiana called Earlham. Then I
went to Washington University in St. Louis for a year. It turned out
that Brown had a big program in acoustics, with people like Robert
Byer, and Robert Bruce Lindsey. After a year at Washington
University 1 decided, "Hey, I'm real hot about acoustics, and the
field of ultrasonics." And so, I transferred after one year of
graduate school at Washington to Brown University, in physics.
There I did my thesis on finite amplitude acoustics - - underwater
water waves and finite amplitude effects. I got my degree in 1966.
699
I went to Stanford Research Institute in 1966, and was there

for almost ten years. SRI was still associated with the University
when I started. For many years there had been a loose federation
with Stanford, but the students rabble-roused at Stanford in terms
of making the University pay more attention to what SRI was doing
in some of their defense related work. The upshot of all their rabble
rousing was that the two institutions were cut apart. That happened
while I was there.
There were student protestors outside and stuff like that. I was
reminded at that time of Emerson and Thoreau, years ago. Thoreau
was thrown in jail for civil disobedience, and Emerson came to see
him. Emerson said, "What are you doing in there, Henry?" and
Henry Thoreau said, "What are you doing outside?"
The separation didn't really make any difference to the people
at SRI. The work didn't change. The place had been on its own for
a number of years, and was very much entrenched in what it was
doing. It was a minor name change as far as the way the place
operated. Our work continued, and the place ran very much as it
had before. I stayed there until the end of 1975, and then I went
to Sandia, and started there in January of '76.
Actually, I started doing for Sandia exactly what I had been
doing for SRI, but it was a job with far more attractive opportunities
to advance.
Bill Twenhofel
USGS - - Panel Member
1 went to school at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison,

Wisconsin, and my father was a professor of geology there. And so,
of course, I had to take the beginning geology course, and 1 just sort
of followed in my dad's footsteps. 1 got a bachelor's degree in
1940, with a major in geology and a minor in mining engineering.
1 went to graduate school at Madison for one year, and then I went
to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley.
When Pearl Harbor occurred 1 was at Berkeley, and 1 left
graduate school and went to work for the U.S. Geological Survey in
Washington DC. Shortly thereafter I was drafted, and I entered the
Navy. 1 went to work at the Naval Research Laboratory in
Washington DC, doing research on the growth of artificial crystals
for sonar. 1 worked there until the war was over, and then went back
to graduate school at Madison. After another year there I had met
all the requirements except the thesis, and 1 went back to work for
the Geological Survey.
I finally got the thesis done. It was on the geology of the
Alaska-Juneau gold mine, in Juneau, Alaska. The Alaska-Juneau
gold mine is unique. It had, at the time it was operating, the lowest
grade ore of any mine in the world, and it still made a profit. So,
1 got my Ph.D., in geology, from the University of Wisconsin in
1952.
When I went to work for the Geological Survey in the early part
of the war, and before I was drafted I was assigned to the Alaskan
work. Then, later, after the war, and while I was in school I went
up to Alaska to do field work in geology every summer. After I left
Madison with all my requirements for my degree except the thesis,
I was transferred by the Survey to Juneau, Alaska, and lived there
year round, and worked there. I loved it. For a young fellow, Alaska
is a great place, and Juneau was a great little town. It was just
wonderful. You feel isolated a little bit, but the hunting, the fishing,
and the outdoor recreation was just great. So 1 lived in Alaska for
a time, and then I was transferred from Juneau in 1952.
I went to Denver, Colorado, with the Geological Survey again.
I was assigned as the assistant group leader to a group studying the
uranium deposits of the United States. The particular assignment
701
of the group I was in was to make estimates of the reserves of

uranium in the United States, and in the rest of the world. I was not
involved in the rest of the world, only in the United States.
It was a lot of guess work, but we took reports from mining
companies, or from government work. There was a lot of govern-
ment work, AEC work. You take the reports, and you construct
conceptual geologic models in your mind of how deposits were
formed, and therefore something about their size.
Before 1952, about 1950, the only known uranium ore bodies
in the United States were the yellow and orange oxidized uranium
minerals that are oxidized because of the surface processes. With
drilling they discovered the primary uranium ore, which is not
oxidized, and that led to some big discoveries in the Colorado
plateau. I was involved with that until about 1956, when the
underground test program began out here. I then got assigned to
the Geological Survey group that supported the AEC at the Test
CAGING THE DRAGON
Wendell Weart
SNL - - Panel Member
My undergraduate school was Cornell College, not to be

confused with Cornell University. I got my undergraduate degree
in ' 5 3 , and then worked for about three years at the Ballistic
Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, in Mary-
land.
Then I went back to get my degree from the University of
Wisconsin. I was really interested in geology, but as I went along 1
felt a desire to get a little more into the hard physics of the thing,
rather than the interpretive aspects that geology mostly involves.
So, I just gradually migrated into geophysics.
I became associated with Sandia in a fortuitous way. I had
never heard of Sandia Laboratories, and one day I got a letter in the
mail saying, "We have just visited with your professor at the
703
University of Wisconsin, who says you are in the process of

completing your degree. We'd be interested in sponsoring that if
you'd be willing to come to work for us." So I started looking
around to see who is this "Sandia Laboratories." The part about
sponsoring my work sounded great, because their offer was a lot
better than the teaching assistantships that were offered in those
days.
So, I joined Sandia in August 1959. It was, I think, primarily
because Sandia was trying to address some of the problems of a
possible test ban treaty that was being much debated at that time,
and they needed a seismologist and geophysicist. At that time we
were a rare breed.
I got my Ph.D. in 1 9 6 1 , from the University of Wisconsin.
They didn't grant a degree in a specialty, so the degree was in
geophysics, and 1 did my thesis in the area of seismology. That was
back in the days when there were very few universities that had
separate geophysics degree programs. It was about to change
greatly because of the Vela Uniform program, and all the studies
that went on in conjunction with trying to understand the seismic
effects of underground detonations.
So I did join Sandia, primarily to do seismologically oriented
work. But one of the first things I got involved in when I went to
Sandia, which eventually led to my containment related duties, was
to reenter an event called Marshmallow, which was a tunnel shot
that had been conducted in Area 16, in 1962. It was a shot with
a long line-of-sight pipe, in a tunnel. It was conducted for
experimental purposes, rather than for developing a device, and was
considered to be a relatively successful event. There had been only
a small amount of experience with tunnel shots, and particularly
with pipe shots in a tunnel.
It was fired about six months after the Gnome event, which
incidentally was, and I find this hard to believe, only about eight
miles from where I have spent the last fifteen years of my life
working on a project, trying to find a suitable means of disposing of
radioactive waste.
Bruce Wheeler
USAF/DNA - - Test Operations
In 1951 I was here, in Albuquerque, being trained to take care

of the nuclear weapons the Air Force had. After graduating from
the assembly course I volunteered for, and was accepted in, what
they called the nuclear officer course. So, I got to go to Los Alamos
and train there, and that was a lot of fun.
So, I was a second lieutenant when they put me in the nuclear
business, and 1 stayed in it virtually the rest of my thirty years in the
Air Force. And it was good to me; I got promoted, and I got some
interesting assignments, like DNA.
1 became involved with DNA and the test work through Ted
]ones, who was the Director of Test. That was late in 1971, and
I had just been promoted to full colonel. I came to work here in
Albuquerque, and served as the head of operations. That meant I
705
was involved in the details of construction, the entire test bed, the
experiment package of the whole facility, and all the aspects of it.
That included the calculations, the predictions, and the whole nine
yards. At that time it seemed to me that people were being very
careful, and a very worried. They were very desirous of putting
together a shot that wouldn't do anything untoward.
There were things changing even as I came there. At that time
there was not a well-founded, formal, well-managed research pro-
gram to try to understand more about the containment of these
tests, and I thought we needed that. One of the things I tried to
encourage, and did encourage after I became the boss, was to go
back and look at successfully contained tests; to mine back and see
how things had worked right. As I perceived it, the only time the
DNA dug back in to see what happened was when something went
wrong. I thought there was a void there that ought to be filled with
some understanding of the phenomenology of a successfully con-
tained test. We routinely planned to use our contingency fund on
every test for reentry mining, if there was any left, and usually there
was some.
That job in DNA, when I became Director of Test, was the best
job I ever had. I wouldn't trade that for anything. It was a field
operation, and I could get the hell out of the office. Somebody
asked me, "Why do you spend so much time out there in the
tunnels?" I said, "That's where I go to regain my sanity." I enjoyed
that kind of work, being part of putting something together, even
though we blew it up afterwards.
Irv Williams
DOE/DASMA Staff
I did my undergraduate work at the University of New Hamp-

shire. 1 joined the Air Force in 1950. I got into the ordnance
business, and from there was put into the nuclear weapons business.
In my early days I was a bomb commander on the old B-45's. I was
non-rated, but assigned to a crew as a weapon commander for the
B-45's, in 1952.
Then I went to Albuquerque for bomb-commander training. I
had been trained as an engineer, and had a lot of ordnance,
armament, fire control, radar work, and so forth, with the Air
Force. And so they flipped a coin, and this unit, which was the first
tactical bomber unit that was equipped with nuclear weapons, won
me. I stayed with them, and went to England for three years with
that group. We were at Sculthorpe, which is about fifteen miles
from Sandringham, up in the Wash beyond Norich. Norich is in
707
Northrop County, and it's quite near the ocean, where England juts
out into the North Sea. There is a big bay area, which is called the
Wash. We operated there for three years, from a British base that
the United States had used during World War I I . We went in there,
rehabilitated it, and operated out of that for three years. That place
was really damp, wet, and rainy, and cold. The North Sea is very
cold. It never gets much above about 34 degrees.
Then I came back and went to school at the Air Force Institute
of Technology, at Wright Patterson. I was in a course called A i r
Ordnance Engineering, and as a result of that I was picked up, and
zinged out to Kirtland to go back into the weapons program. This
was after I came out of graduate school.
After three years at Albuquerque, which was a wonderful
assignment, doing nuclear weapons work for the B-58 Hustler, and
going through command and staff school, I was surprised by my next
assignment, which was to Livermore. It was out of the blue. I had
asked to go to the West Coast, and I got a letter sending me to
Livermore. I was there assigned to the Defense Nuclear Agency's
predecessor. I first came to the AEC, I would say, when I first went
to Livermore. That was in 1 9 6 1 .
I worked with the engineers and the chemists in explosives, for
B Division at Site 3 0 0 . I kept track of every test design as it grew
up during those early days. I followed all of them all the way
through, and I did that for a good part of three years. I also spent
time down in the plutonium building with Bill Ramsey, and with Gus
Dorough in explosives. And occasionally I got to the Test Site.
I was at Livermore from '61 to ' 6 4 , and I was there before we
resumed testing. I was in the office with Marv Martin when the alert
came to move and do a test. I don't know who called with those
instructions, for sure, but I know people moved, and they went in
all directions that afternoon. Immediately, after a short council,
things started to move immediately.
So, I was there at the beginning of the resumption of testing.
I was able to follow through the full three years, and follow the
preparations for Dominic, the Pacific operation. I also did some
work with the Laboratory people at Travis, and I spent several times
there with the Hotspot team, with Marv Martin. I had a very good
introduction to the program. I wasn't part of a design or device
team, but I followed the designs and all the work in the Laboratory.
On a few occasions I did help with a little assembly work at the

Laboratory, and I worked down at the Test Site with some
disassemblies, with Ken Beckman and other fellows from W
Division. 1 got to know a lot of people because of the opportunities
I was given, working with Marv, to work with the Laboratory people.
It was a way to really learn about the program. It was a tremendous
experience.
709
',!•' /
710
Index
App, Fred
Background 613
Atmospheric pumping
Peterson, E.
Laboratory experiments 403-405
Bandicoot event
Brownlee, R.
Containment failure 81-82
Baneberry event 93
Hudson, B; Rambo, J: Weart, W.
Drilling problems 384-386
Bass, Bob
Background 616
Block motion
Patch, D.
How can blocks move? Where's the space? 359
Peterson, E.
Effect on the residual stress field 359-361
Importance to containment 362-363
Ristvet, B.
Amount of movement observed 350
Effect on the residual stress field 351
Kinds of block motion 348-349
Smith, C.
Observations on reentry 352-353
Brownlee, Bob
Background 620
Broyles, Carter
Background 624
Bulking factors
Keller, C. 266-267
Kunkle, T. 277-278
Cable gas blocks
House, J.
Fiber optics cables 530-531
Olsen, C.
Gas blocks and fanouts 398, 405
Ristvet, B.
Leakage through cables; DNA experience 533-534
Roth, B.
Livermore practice 531-532
Scolman, T.
LASL gas blocks and fanouts 405-406
Calculations
App, F.
Effective stress models 173 -174
Brownlee, R.
First Los Alamos containment calculations; Bernillilo, 18-24
Duff, R,
Assumption of continum mechanics; inadequacies 303-312
Keller, C.
The One Ton exercise 168-169
Rambo, J.
For the Galena event 507-508
Rimer, N,
Effective stress models; Pile Driver 175-176
Campbell, Bob
Background 626
Camphor event
Kennedy, J.
Carpetbag event
Rambo, J.
Areal subsidence post-shot 253
Carroll, Rod
Background 629
Cavity collapse
Keller, C; Miller, R.
Collapse to surface on Rainier Mesa 267-268
Kunkle, T.
Mechanisms 279-280
Times of collapse 273-275
Miller, R.
Hazards of delayed surface collapses 267
Cavity growth
Patch, D.: Rambo, J.
Where does the material go? 252-254
Patch, D.; Rimer, N.
Important factors 230-231
Rambo, J.
Influence of rock properties 230-231
Cavity pressure
Brownlee, B.
Instances of low pressures in standing cavities 281-282
Hudson, B.
Measurements in nuclear cavities 247-250
Kunkle, T.
Inference of low pressures prior to collapse 281
Rambo, J.
Observations on Barnwell 282
Index 713
Smith, C.
Pressure in HE formed cavities 246-247
Cavity shape
Patch, D.
DNA interest in stemming column effects 244-245
Rambo, J.
Measurements showing non-spherical growth 245-246
Ristvet, B.
Information from tunnel reentries 243-244
Cavity size
Bass, R.
Junior Jade HE experiments 343-344
Duff, R.
Inability to caculate 308-310
Higgins, G.
Of the Rainier event 36-38, 46-47
Kunkle, T.
Variations in scaled cavity sizes 233-235
Patch, D.
Determining the cavity boundary 236
Patch, D.; Rambo. J.
Effect of rock strength 236-23 8
Rambo, J.;Rimer, N.
French tests in Hoggar granite 242-243
Rimer, N.
Scaled cavity sizes 239-240
Cavity temperature
Higgins, G.
Temperatures in the first second after detonation 250-252
Chemistry of gases in the chimney
Duff, R.
Unexplained data 287-290
Chimney bulking factors
Keller, C. 291-292
Kunkle, T. 302-303
Chimney material
Flangas, W.; Weart, W.
Characteristics; seen on reentry 278-279
Chimney pressurization experiments
Peterson, Ed
Methods, conclusions 282-286
Codes
App, F.
LASL containment codes 498
App F.; Bass R.; Dismukes C; Patch D.
Discussion of 2-D, 3-D codes 513-517
Dismukes, C.
Difficulties in modeling 512-513
Duff, R.
Critique of current approaches 509-512
Higgins, G.
UN EC, which became SOC 495-496
Keller, C.
KRAK; JACTS code 500-502
Containment
Brownlee, R.
The price of success 546-547
Why LASL used drill holes exclusively 69-70
Definition of
Before the Treaty 12
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty interpretations 5
Higgins, G.
Containment of post-explosion gases 38
Scolman, T.
Field costs 545-547
Successful containment
CEP Charter definition 7
Containment calculations
App, F.; House, J.
At LASL, currently 503
Patch, D.
Criticisms directed at calculators 517-518
Rambo, J.
At Livermore, currently 504-505
Barnwell; A case study 519-522
Before Baneberry, at Livermore 496-497
Collaboration between Livermore and LASL 506-507
Galena event 507-508
High yield vs low yield containment 508-509
Containment Evaluation Panel
Charter 6
Comments about
Brownlee, R. 580-581
Broyles, C. 94
Hearst, J. 581-582
House, J. 105-107
Hudson, B. 575-576
Jenkins, E. 576-577
Rambo, J. 506, 582-583
Ristvet, B. 583-584
Scolman, T. 577-580
Weart, W. 580
Williams, I 584-506
Vinceguerra Committee report
Formation of the Panel 93
Containment groups; DNA
Formation 107-112
Containment groups; Livermore
Index 715
Hudson, B.
Formation 91-02
Role in the sixties 94-96
Containment groups; Los Alamos
Brownlee, R.
Formation 96-97
House, J.
Assignment to the containment group 97
•'- Ineractions with Livermore 102-105
Interactions within the Laboratory 527
Presentations to the CEP 98-99
Relationship with the USGS 98-99
Role of the containment scientist 537-539
House, J.; Kunkle, T.
Reorganizations 100-103
Crater dimensions
Keller, C; Kunkle, T.
Correlation with yield 265-272
Crossroads operation
Campbell, R. 9
Current practices
House, J.; Page, J.; Roth, B.
Emplacement of downhole hardware 586-589
% Miller, R.
--> ; Downhole cable repairs 383-384
''|/' Page, J.; Roth, B.
• •'-• Livermore downhole operations 539-543
':.£- What does a Livermore Test Director do? 523-527
• J. , Data banks
}>\[ Keller, C; Rambo, J.
•:'fl Development of 176-178
-•V Depth of burial
•fjS Higgins, G.
,- Origins and evolution 366-372
Diluted Waters event
•f Olsen, C.
Observers reactions 87-88
.Jf~ Dismukes, Chuck
j,:"' Background 630
•; Door Mist event
v- LaComb, J.
- Double Play event
-; LaComb, J.
Drilling
Brownlee, R.
J'., . Early LASL drilling experience; cased holes 61-63
1^"
Miller, R.
Casing a drilled hole 379
Development of big hole drilling 373-375
Early Livermore drilling experience 62
Extra costs for containment related work 377
Sloughing in drill holes, problems 381-382
Straight holes and plumb holes 377-378
Use of underreamers 375-377
Duff, Russ
Background 632
Eagle event
Brownlee, R.
Possible cause of the containmrent failure 551-553
Olsen, C. 88
Energy coupling and ground motion
App, F.
Relevence to containment 207-208
Higgins, G.
Observed variations 208-211
Rambo, J.
Tybo ground motion calculations 224-227
Fallout
Campbell, R.
On-site problems in the fifties 15-16
Ross, W.
Bravo event 13-15
Faults
Orkild, P.
Opinion about the faults on Oscuro 131
Twenhofel, W.
Weart, W.
Pinestripw eventt; afault as the path for the vent 133
Fenske, Paul
Background 636
Flangas, Bill
Background 639
Front end design
Dismukes, C.
Core flow 475-476
Let the energy go up the pipe? Eagle event. 473-474
Reverse cone 470-478
Very low yield devices 477
Peterson, E.
Comments 478
Geology
Brownlee, R.; Orkild, P.; Rimer, N.
Does it matter to containment? 134-135
Index 717
Carroll, R.; Jenkins, E.

Yucca flats; the tuffs below the alluvium 125-127
Duff, R.; Jenkins, E.
Frequency of faults 354-355
Orkild, P.
Blocks, definition 347-348
Clay beds 136
Geologic structure of Rainier Mesa 123-125
Paleozoic rocks 125
Gnome event
Higgins, G.; Weart, W.
Greenhouse Operation
Campbell, R. 9
Ground motion
Kunkle, T.
Inability to predict 274-275
Hardtack II operation 24-25
Sewell, D.
Reason final event not fired 29-30
Hearst, Joe
Background 642
Higgins, Gary
Background 649
Horizontal line-of-sight pipes
Duff, R.; Patch, D.
Pipe flow 480-481, 488-489
Patch, D.
Assymetric pipe closures 481 -482
Ground motions; shock loadings 479-480
Late time calculations 478-479
Peterson, E.
Late time containment issues 487
Puzzling observations about the events 492-494
Rimer, N.
Ground motions 489
Ristvet, B.
Low yield sources 490-492
House, Jack
Background 651
Hudson, Billy
Background 653
Hupmobile event
Hudson, B.
Containment fai 1 lure 91
:
!^!jti:% iv.i-o" »
Hydrodynamic yield measurements

Bass, R.
Development of the slifer measurements 217
The Universal Relation 218-219
Work with Los Alamos 216
Brownlee, R.
Sonic velocity determination 214-216
Rambo, J.
Corrections to the data 219-223
Differences between slifer and corrtex mesurements 222-223
Hydrofractures 334
Hudson, B.
Good or bad for containment? 343
Kunkle, T.; Ristvet, B.
Observed frequency of fractures 339-340
Patch, D.
Questionable importance for containment 344-345
Peterson, E.
Fracture formation 331-332
Steam generator experiments 330-331
Rimer, N.
Calculational methods 334-338
Smith, C.
Experimental work in G tunnel 340-343
Hydrology
Fenske, P.
Depth of the water table at NTS 140-142
Early work at the NTS 138-139
Perched water 142-144
Water mounds 144-145
Hydronuclear experiments
Brownlee, R.
Containment experience during the moratorium 59-60
Inhomogeneities
Duff, R.; Higgins, G.
What scale is important 356-357, 370-372
Jenkins, Evan
Background 656
Johnson, Gerry
Background 658
Keller, Carl
Background 662
Kennedy, Jerry
Background 664
Kunkle, Tom
Background 666
Index 719
LaComb, Joe
Background 669
Leaks and seeps
Hudson, B.
Late time seeps on Pahute Mesa 402-403
Keller, C.
LASL attitude toward before Baneberry 396-397
Logan event
Clark, A.
Planning, results 27-29
Logging tools
Fenske, P.
Commercial tools in the fifties 179-180
Hearst, J.
Accuracy and precision 193-194
Building a calibration facility 185-186
Dry hole acoustic log 195-196
Epithermal neutron log 190-191, 196
Gravimeter 198-201
In-situ strength 204-205
In-situ stress 202-204
.Need for the logs 191-192
Problems with cal ibrations 187-189
Resistivity logs 197
Seism ic surveys 201 -202
Seismic velocity 198
Sound speed 183-184
Unsuitability of commercial tools 183
Orkild, P.
Comments about the epithermal neutron log 137
Rambo, J.
Beginnings of the Li vermore logging program 182-183
Marshmallow event
Broyles, C.
Containment features 426-428
Weart, W.
Reentry observations 428-429
Material properties
App, F.
Modeling 159-62
Optimum rock properties for containment 322-323
Over large regions 158-159
Bass, R.
Hugoniot measurements 154-156
Bass, R.; Higgins G.
Megabar measurements 156-158
Brownlee, R.; Olsen, C.
Use by rhe Laboratories in the sixties 148-150
Hearst, J.
Bound water vs free water 190-191
:-7r
Keller, C.
Permeability 163-165, 286-287
LaComb, J.
Hudson Moon; Inferences from the rock samples 439
Patch, D.
Limitations of mechanical test data 169-170
Rimer, N.
In-situ strength 174-175
Shock damage to materials 170-172
Smith, C.
In-situ equation of state measurements 166-168
Value of core data 162-163
Twenhofel, W.
Mighty Oak event
Bass, R.; Patch, D.: Peterson, E.; Ristvet, B.
Sample protection failure 565-570
Miller, Roy
Background 673
Mint Leaf event
LaComb, J.
Leakage over the TAPS 438
Nevada Test Site
Brownlee, R.
Opinions about the value of the Site 113-119
Selection by AI Graves 11-12
Miller, R.
Annual variation of magnetic declination 379
Non-condensable gas production
Higgins, G. 262-264
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty 5
Olsen, C.
Background 675
Line of sight closures 89-91
Pipe flow measurements 88-89
Orkild, Paul
Background 677
Pacific operations
Campbell, R. 13-15
Johnson, G. 10-11
Page, Jim
Background 681
Pahute Mesa
Orkild, P.
Data collection 128-129
Late-time seepage of gases 13 0
Index 721
Pascal events
Brownlee, R.; Campbell, R. 20-23
Patch, Dan
Background 681
Peterson, Ed
Background 683
Pike event
Brownlee, R.
Pile Driver event
Flangas, W.
Mining in granite 425-426
Pipe flow calculations
Hudson, B; Olsen, C.
At Livermore, before Baneberry 499-500
Plugs
House, J.
Los A lamos use of two-part epoxy plugs 412-413
Keller, C.
First LASL use of coal-tar epoxy plugs 397
Kunkle, T.
Analysis of coal-tar epoxy plugs 409-411
Olsen, C.
Cables shorted by exotherm in concrete plugs 399-400
Reasons for use by Livermore 399
Page, J.; Roth, B.
Coal-tar epoxy; Two part epoxy; Gypsum cement 535-537
Post-shot drilling
Miller, R.
Angle drilling 389
Chimney conditions 386-388
Prompt radiochemical sampling
Heckman, R.
Des Moines Event 75-80
Eel event 74-75
Neptune 25-27
Heckman, R,; Higgins, G.
Gnome event 72-73
Radioacitive debris
Differences on definition of 5-6
Rainier event
Flangas, W.
Reentry mining 424-425
Higgins, G.
Cavity chemistry 51-57
Cavity size 38
Containment design; Gene Pelsor 41
~"~—"ty.'i ••;—rr
Fractures from the cavity 57-58, 328-330

Post-shot drilling 42-44
Post-shot exploration 47-50
Post-shot samples 44-46
Radiochemical sampling 35
Seismic concerns 38-39
Johnson, G.
Concern about Rainier containment; Fran Porzel 34-35
Dave Griggs proposes advance announcement 39
"Earthquake Maker" 32-34
Planning 31-33
Site selection 32
Rainier Mesa
Flangas, W.
Selection as site for Rainier 469
Rambo, John
Background 686
Ranger operation 12
Readiness to resume testing
Brownlee, R.; Wouters, L.; Foster, J. 63-65
Red Hot event
Duff, R.; Risrvet, B.; Smith, C.
Post-shot fractures observed 326-328
Peterson, E.
Containment attributed to fractures 332-333
Residual stress
App, F.
Doubts about the existence 301 -302
Bass, R.
Evidence for; Sandia Puff and Tuff experiment 295-297
Broyles, C.
HE experiments showing a stress cage 295
Duff, R.
Case against residual stress 303-308
Higgins, G.
Early evidence for recompaction 292-294
Hudson, B.
Difficulties in trying to measure 300-301
Patch, D.
Duration of residual stresses 320-322
Rambo, J.
Decay of residual stresses 317
Evidence from calculations 299-300, 313
Field measurements 313-314
Importance of shear strengh 314-317
Orkney event; data indicating residual stress 314
Rimer, N. 174
Duration of residual stresses 319-320
Grout sphere experiments 318
Well known concept in civil engineering 294-295
Index
Smith, C.
Evidence for from HE work 297-298
Evidence from nuclear shots 299
Rimer, Norton
Background 688
Ristvet, Byron
Background 690
Rock melt
Higgins, G.
Amount of melted rock produced 211-212
Effect of water 259-262
Importance of water content of the rocks 240-241
Rock melted per kiloton of yield 255-262
Roth, Bernie
Background 693
Sandstone operation
Campbell, R. 9
Scolman. Tom
Background 695
Scooter experiment
Bass, R.
Cause of the misfire 65-68
Pressure measurements 213-214
Scroll event
Olsen, C.
Smith, Carl
Background 698
Stemming
Brownlee, R.
Evolution to Los Alamos Standard 5 stemming 392-394
Brownlee, R.; Scolman, T.
Stemming slumps and rates of stemming 395-396
House, J.
Reasons for Livermore/Los Alamos stemming plans 397-398
Hudson, B.
Comparison of LASL and Livermore stemming history 413-414
Current Livermore stemming philosophy 401 -402
Why two different stemming plans? 417
Page, J.
Problem on Galena 543-544
Rambo, J. 459-462
Stemming platforms
Hudson, B.
Gypsum concrete plugs 408
Plugs and fines layers 400-401
Scolman, T.
LASL plugs not considered to be stemming platforms 406-408
Tamalpias Event
Flangas, W.
Hydrogen explosion 421-424
Test Evaluation Panel
Olsen, C. 83-84
Thoughts, Opinions, and Concerns
Bass, R. 588-589, 593-594
Brownlee, R. 595-596
Broyles, C. 601-602
Duff, R. 589-592
Flangas, W. 593
Hudson, B. 604-607
Keller, C. 603
Kunkle, T. 593
Olsen, C. 587-588
Orkild, P. 589
Peterson, E. 597-600
Rimer, N. 594-595
Scolman. T. 602-603
Twenhofel, W. 592
Wheeler, B 603-604
Tunnel containment
Duff, R.
Importance of air-filled voids 439-440
Keller, C.
Unexplained variations from shot to shot 446
LaComb, J.
Cable gas blocks 441
High strength grout 436
Misty North; first use of two overburden plugs 441
Patch, D.
Grout stemming designs 437-438
Peterson, E.
Differences of opinion about air-filled voids 440
Peterson, E.; Weart, W.
Same designs, different results 433-435
Weart, W.
Changes after Baneberry 446-451
Stemming on Marshmallow and Gum Drop 432-433
Tunnel sample protection
DBS; Debris Barrier System
Kennedy, J. 458
FAC; Fast Acting Closure
Bass, R.; Kennedy, J.; design 455,461
Keller, C; purpose 455-456
Patch, D; need for timing 456-458
Helix
Bass, R. Experience on tunnel events 485-486
Index 725
Keller, C: on early events 468

Keller, C; experiments with HE 483-485
Kennedy, J.
Early HE machines; dimple machines 460
HE driven vertical closure 458
Joint DNA/Sandia funding of hardware development 459-460
MAC; Modified Auxilliary Closure
Bass, R.; Importance of MAC survival for 100 msec 463
Bass, R.; Ristvet, B.; High pressure gas vs propellents 463
Broyles, C; Deveopment leading to the MACS 429-430
Broyles, C; Sandia participation in development 454-455
Kennedy, J; development of 458-459
Wheeler, B.; Sandia participation in development 453-454
Ristvet, B.
People involved in the development 461
TAPS; Tunnel and Pipe Seal
Kennedy, J.; description 458
Weart, W.
Early philosophy 432
Tunnel usage
LaComb, J.
Reuse after leaks into the tunnel complex 442
Wheeler, B.
Participation by the military services 443
Tunnels
Carothers, J.
Why LASL never used tunnels 70
Flangas, W.
First DNA interest in N tunnel and P tunnel 436
Ristvet, B.
Value of reentries 244
Tunnels, research
Keller, C.
Development of the low-yield test bed 444-445
LaComb, J.; Ristvet, B.
Motivation to do 442, 451
Smith, C.
Stresses loading containment hardware 439-440
Weart, W.
Use of early measurements 448-440
Twenhofel, Bill
Background 700
Tybo event. See Energy coupling and ground motion: Rambo, J.: Tybo ground
motion calculations
Uncased emplacement holes
Miller, R.
Concerns about their use 380-381
Scolman, T.
Use by Los Alamos 381
Underground shots
Brownlee, R.
Need forseen by Al Graves 17-18
Johnson, G.
Need for underground shots 23-24
Teller, E. & Griggs, D.
Report on feasibility 16
USGS
Orkild, P.
NTS geologic data bases 136-137
Twenhofel
Early mapping of the NTS 119-120
Twenhofel, W.
HE shots before Rainier 120-121
Vertical lines-of-sight
Duff, R.
Measurements on front end performance 469
Hudson, B.
Earliest Livermore designs 465, 469
Keller, C.
Assymetric pipe closures 467-468
Early front end design at LASL 466-467
Early LASL pipe flow measurements 466-467
Weart, Wendell
Background 702
Wheeler, Bruce
Background 704
Williams, Irv
Background 706
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Caging The Dragon - The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions

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Caging The Dragon - The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions

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The Containment of Underground

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Portions of this document may be illegible

Robert Brownlee, in a talk given at the Monterey Containment

That doesn't have to do directly with containment, but it does have

It was the Department of Energy Nevada Operations Office

The science of the containment of the radioactive by-products

it, and simultaneously "successfully contain" the radioactive mate-

To discuss the containment of nuclear explosions it would be

radioactive debris to be p r e s e n t . . . " What comprises the radioac-

III A Emplacement and firing of each nuclear device will

III C Each test will be designed to be successfully

And so it was with the Atomic Energy Commission, the Labo-

After the end of World War II the United States conducted

Gerry Johnson, after a short time as a weapons designer,

When we removed the people from Enewetak, in the Marshall

on the community, and the passage of the radioactive cloud. There

Typical shot tower. Operation Teapot, 1955.

"2. A depth of 3000 feet is ample to be sure of no surface

Campbell: Didn't need to. We did have a lid on the hole.

Brownlee: Our first underground tests were done in '57.

One of the things we were annoyed about in '57 and '58 - -

Meanwhile, two different paths were leading to changes in the

September 12, 1958, Otero event, unstemmed hole.

September 12, 1958, Otero event, unstemmed hole.

Surface structure for Otero event.

some people might say, the unreliability of designers. Neptune was

Gerry Johnson happened to be down there at the time, and their

October 14, 1958, Neptune event, 116 tons, tunnel U12c.

October 30, 1958, Blanca event, 22 kt, tunnel U12b.

we start the moratorium." We agreed on that. That gave us an extra

The first nuclear detonation that was designed to be completely

We choose the site based on topography. We decided on a

Carothers: Gary, when did you first became involved in the

Higgins: Gene Pelsor was the one in Livermore that I particu-

Higgins: Yes. It would have been precise in water until the

contaminating the environment in any gross way. We might criticize

Preshot tunnel configuration in region of detonation.

T0S 6 80' SHAFT ~H

Geological cross section at Rainier.

Higgins: People didn't have administratively designated roles

Those measurements were recorded, of course, and people

Carothers: This picture you're giving of these slabs of material

trying to understand what happened to the rock materials them-

Carothers: That doesn't last long.

Somewhere out about a meter or two meters from one kiloton