Civilian uses of "nuclear bomb" !

You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility. Nuclear weapons aren't only good for leveling cities, they've also been used throughout the last 50 years for a variety of civilian purposes like stimulating natural gas production — and all kinds of innovative proposals have been slapped on the table to harness the awesome power of the nuclear blast for economic benefit.

Harness the versatility of nuclear energy:

1)Creating a Harbor, or Just a Hole
If there is one thing nuclear weapons have been proven to do, it's make big holes, and some scientists realized that could be a business proposition.

2)Creating a New Panama Canal
There's long been a problem with that engineering marvel of the early 20th century, the Panama Canal: It's just too small. For decades, people floated plans to build a bigger, better canal that could accommodate supertankers and our other outsize transportation vehicles.

3)Natural Gas Exploration
Beginning in the mid-1960s, scientists used targeted nuclear explosions to stimulate natural gas production by fracturing the rocks in which the gas was locked to make them more permeable. It worked well enough to warrant progressively larger tryouts.

4)Disposing of Nuclear Waste
One of the most incredible proposed applications of a nuclear explosion is to help store nuclear waste itself. A hole is bored beneath the waste processing plant, and a nuclear bomb is set off in the hole. Then the radioactive waste is poured into the subterranean cavity so formed, over a 25-year filling period. The wastes heat up through their own activity, boil dry, and eventually melt themselves and some surrounding rock into a glassy ball.

5)Human Spaceflight
If we can't use them on Earth, we might still be able to use them to get to outer space. Project Orion, spearheaded by Freeman Dyson among other eminent scientists, was to build a spaceship powered by atomic weapons.

6)Defending Earth From an Asteroid
Many scientists aren't so sure that nuclear weapons are the best way to defend Earth from a close call with a world-ending asteroid, but NASA maintains that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons could save the Earth.