Garfield County formally opposes Rulison ‘Path Forward’

Officials in Garfield County are determined to win compensation of some sort for landowners and holders of mineral rights in the area surrounding the Rulison nuclear test site in the western part of the county.

And, following a vote on Monday, the Board of County Commissioners is formally rejecting a plan the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has named the “Path Forward” for the site.

It was the predecessor of the DOE, called the Atomic Energy Commission, that in 1969 set off an atomic bomb some 8,400 feet below the surface in Rulison in an effort to free up gas fields trapped in the deep rock formations. Rulison is roughly five miles west of Rifle along Interstate 70.

The bomb, according to some estimates, was three times the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II, and the blast was part of a program intended to find peaceful uses for nuclear energy.

The gas at the site, however, was too radioactive to be useful, and the site has been capped and largely out of the public eye until recently. In 2003, the DOE established the Office of Legacy Management “to provide a long-term, sustainable solution to the legacy of the Cold War,” according to the DOE website.

At the same time, improved technology and rising prices for natural gas have sparked a boom in Garfield County and other parts of the country. Recently, drilling rigs have moved ever closer to a federally-controlled, half-mile patch of land directly above the blast zone where drilling has not been permitted.

The DOE’s Path Forward outlines a “staged approach” that, among other things, allows rigs to drill incrementally closer to that plot of land. The plan calls for testing of any gas recovered, to see if it is radioactive.

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