Nuclear security

America's Mad Scientists Wanted to Use Nuclear Power to Create Tunnels in a Shocking Way

Digging out deep underground complexes or undersea bases could be expedited the Atomic way, in an alternate universe where the wildest ideas of the 1950s, 60s and 70s came to pass. Although our own timeline relies on mega-engineering for transportation, energy and architectural infrastructure, for the past half-century we've mostly relied on conventional power sources and design principles.

Today's Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) rank among the wonders of modern machinery. As wide as a several-story building and as long as a football field, these giant metal worms chew their way through rock and earth to dig out the world's ever-expanding networks of subways, drain tunnels, mines and bunkers. Aft of a huge rotating cutting head, a series of powerful jacks press, push and release the TBM along the tunnel's walls, to drive the excavation forward.

From the tunnel head forward of the cutting head, the excavated material trundles through the bulk of the machine like food through a gut to waiting hopper cars, which carry the rock out of the tunnel to a dump area. The insides of the TBM form a mass of engines and moving parts as dense as a sub's interior, full of noise and motion.

But in the 1970s, Los Alamos National Laboratory explored a science-fiction approach to tunneling: using nuclear power to literally melt holes through rock and turn the melted rock into tunnel lining. One product of the lab's research was a patent for a nuclear subterrene—a machine which could theoretically move through rock the way a submarine moves through water.