The use of nuclear explosives in mining and excavation.

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On this day in 1962 a team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory lowered a W71 thermonuclear device 194 meters down a shaft that had been drilled into the desert at the Nevada test site. The goal of the day's test was to evaluate the use of nuclear explosives in mining and excavation. The 104-kiloton blast created a crater 390 meters in diameter and 100 meters deep. It also released 880,000 curies (33 PBq) of radioactive iodine-131, an agent of thyroid disease, into the atmosphere. The USSR also experimented with nuclear excavation. On 15 January 1965 a thermonuclear device was used to create an artificial reservoir in Kazakhstan, Lake Balapan. The lake's water remains radioactive.

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