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Title: The USSR Once Tried Reversing a River's Direction with 'Peaceful
Nuclear Explosions'

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/...

"In the 1970s, the USSR used nuclear devices to try to send water from
Siberia's rivers flowing south, instead of its natural route north..."
remembers the BBC. [T]he Soviet Union simultaneously fired three nuclear
devices buried 127m (417ft) underground. The yield of each device was 15
kilotonnes (about the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945).
The experiment, codenamed "Taiga", was part of a two-decade long Soviet
programme of carrying out peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). In this case,
the blasts were supposed to help excavate a massive canal to connect the
basin of the Pechora River with that of the Kama, a tributary of the Volga.
Such a link would have allowed Soviet scientists to siphon off some of the
water destined for the Pechora, and send it southward through the Volga. It
would have diverted a significant flow of water destined for the Arctic Ocean
to go instead to the hot, heavily populated regions of Central Asia and
southern Russia. This was just one of a planned series of gargantuan "river
reversals" that were designed to alter the direction of Russia's great
Eurasian waterways... Years later, Leonid Volkov, a scientist involved in
preparing the Taiga explosions, recalled the moment of detonation. "The final
countdown began: ...3, 2, 1, 0... then fountains of soil and water shot
upward," he wrote. "It was an impressive sight." Despite Soviet efforts to
minimise the fallout by using a low-fission explosive, which produce fewer
atomic fragments, the blasts were detected as far away as the United States
and Sweden, whose governments lodged formal complaints, accusing Moscow of
violating the Limited Test Ban Treaty... Ultimately, the nuclear explosions
that created Nuclear Lake, one of the few physical traces left of river
reversal, were deemed a failure because the crater was not big enough.
Although similar PNE canal excavation tests were planned, they were never
carried out. In 2024, the leader of a scientific expedition to the lake
announced radiation levels were normal. "Perhaps the final nail in the coffin
was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, which not only consumed a huge
amount of money, but pushed environmental concerns up the political agenda,"
the article notes. "Four months after the Number Four Reactor at the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev
cancelled the river reversal project." And a Russian blogger who travelled to
Nuclear Lake in the summer of 2024 told the BBC that nearly 50 years later,
there were some places where the radiation was still significantly elevated.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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