This was a whole line of research the US and USSR did during the height of the Cold War, peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. Which was also a convenient excuse to just test more nuclear weapons. This was acutally the excuse India gave for its first nuclear test, they said it was for peaceful mountain removal.
They found that anything above ground (digging canals or boring through mountains) was completely infeasible becuase it would cost way more to do decontamination than if they had just dug it with conventional tools. The only possible uses was in the oil and gas industry, either to seal off oil/gas blowouts (like what happened at Deep Sea Horizon), or to do nuclear fracking.
This was a whole line of research the US and USSR did during the height of the Cold War, peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. Which was also a convenient excuse to just test more nuclear weapons. This was acutally the excuse India gave for its first nuclear test, they said it was for peaceful mountain removal.
They found that anything above ground (digging canals or boring through mountains) was completely infeasible becuase it would cost way more to do decontamination than if they had just dug it with conventional tools. The only possible uses was in the oil and gas industry, either to seal off oil/gas blowouts (like what happened at Deep Sea Horizon), or to do nuclear fracking.
They tried that a couple times but the gas was too radioactive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy
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It's peaceful as opposed to what they acutally wanted to do with them, which was to drop them on Islamabad