By: Anthony Dicandia, Shelby Warner, Alana Dandridge
Amidst an ongoing Cold War between Russia and the U.S., the federal government alongside with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission conducted two nuclear explosions in 1964 in the Tatum Salt Dome near Baxterville, Mississippi.
According to the “Nuclear Blasts in Mississippi” article by Mississippi History Now, the United States wanted more details about nuclear testing and how to discover if one was occurring. Therefore the U.S. created Project Dribble which involved two testings in Mississippi.
At 10 a.m. on the morning of Oct. 22, 1964 the first of the two blasts rattled the earth. The blast could be felt nearly 30 miles away in Hattiesburg, Miss. The Tatum Salt Dome, which contained the blast, is about 5,000 feet in diameter and about 1,500 feet below the surface.
According to the U.S. National Geodetic Survey Special Projects Field Party, a federal agency that manages a national coordinate system for transportation and communication, the goal of the tests was to discover the distance between each seismic motions from the testing to compare previous studies about the explosion and to describe the symmetry of maximum motion. The tests were conducted and, in large part, labeled a success by the federal government.
Charles T. Swann, the associate director for terrestrial programs at the Mississippi Mineral Resource Institute, said why he believed the government felt the test were successful.
“You’re talking about things that were done in the 1960s. We were in the middle of a Cold War with Russia. The point in doing all of this was to sort of educate ourselves on nuclear explosions,” Swann said, “can we determine whether the Russians are setting off nuclear explosions or are they just earthquakes? Can we tell the difference?”
Swann said the government was also testing a new theory, decoupling theory, and a salt dome was a perfect place to experiment.
“They were testing decoupling theory and they had to have a way to actually do that and they did it. You may take issue with how they did it, but it was successful, they learned things,” he said. According to geology.com, “a salt dome is a mound or column of salt that has intruded upwards into overlying sediments.” In some conditions salt domes can rise thousands of feet from their original growth.
Salt domes, in large part, formed during the Mesozoic Era when large seas that covered the U.S., evaporated. Salt domes are extremely important to the geography of the earth and their resources serve people throughout their day to day lives
“Salt is used in a lot of things, from an economic standpoint because that’s what you use on your table, that’s what you de-ice roads with, you make chemicals out of salt. Salt has a lot of practical uses that people don’t think about. The salt on your table probably came out of a salt dome at some place,” he said.
Because of the salt and the surrounding groundwater, Swann believes that testing nuclear explosions in salt domes could be somewhat of a risk. It all depends on how well the radiation and surround waste is contained.
“It would be a function of how well they contained that radiation. If it was properly contained it will always be there for quite a long time but it should not be a major as far as surface environments are concerned,” Swann said, “the question is did they contain that properly, is it contained? I think those are some of the questions people still sort of talk about.”
Even with the possibility of a major risk, Swann said he believes human beings are safe from surrounding radiation as long as the federal government monitors the site carefully.
“I think the state government, the federal government should assume for the foreseeable future that the site will have to be monitored fairly closely.” Said Swann, “If those radionuclides are kept inside the salt, probably it’s safe. That’s a big if, there are things that can happen, and again it comes down to monitoring. We’ve got to keep a close eye on the site,” Swann said.