In 1963, the Urta-Bulak gas well in Uzbekistan had a blowout deep underground that caused an estimated 12 millions of cubic meters of natural gas to vent uncontrollably every day and catch on fire. For the next three years, Soviet engineers tried everything they could think of to put out the fire, to no avail … so they decided to detonate a nuclear bomb to seal the well and stop the raging fire.
Soviet physicists calculated that they’d need 30 kilotons of nuclear bombs - double of what was used in Hiroshima. In 1966, they drilled a borehole 1.4 km deep next to the estimated blowout region, lowered the bomb, sealed the top with concrete … and detonated it.
Newspaper Pravda Vostoka of Tashkent described what happened next:
“On that cold autumn day in 1966, an underground tremor of unprecedented force shook the ground with a sparse grass cover on white sand. A dusty haze rose over the desert. The orange colored torch of the blazing well diminished, first slowly, then more rapidly, until it flickered and finally died out. For the first time in 1,064 days, quiet descended on the area. The jet-like roar of the gas well had been silenced.”
That was the first time a nuclear bomb was used to put out fires in a gas field, but it wasn’t the last: a few months later, Soviet engineers used a 47-kiloton nuclear bomb to seal a well and put out a fire at a nearby Pamuk gas field.
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