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In 1958, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had a bunch of spare nuclear devices. Next came the bright idea to use them to carve out a harbor near Kotzebue, with an underground blast 20 times the size of Hiroshima's.

The plan was not foolproof.

Aside from the environmental and human health effects, which weren't totally known at the time, and the opposition from Inupiat Eskimos who lived there, the harbor at Point Hope would have been iced over 10 months a year and would have been impassable.

"What finally put the kibosh on it was that it didn't make any economic sense," said Ted Merrell, fish biologist who went out there at the time to gather baseline fish data for the atomic agency.

Longtime Juneau resident Merrell gave a talk at the State Historical Collections on Tuesday about Project Chariot, as it was known, and other ecological disasters Alaskans averted, often because they didn't pencil out.

Merrell came to Alaska in 1956 from Oregon to work at the newly established National Marine Fisheries Service, in the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. Early on he went to the Arctic to assess the effects of DDT on Alaska wildlife. During his career at NMFS, Merrell traveled all over Alaska as a field biologist in a trusty, amphibious Grumman Goose, taking baseline data and thousands of pictures as he went. Merrell has donated those photos and notes from his long career with the agency to the State Historical Collections, available to anyone with a library card.

For Merrell, the photos are reminders of how different Alaska could have turned out, the "devastating effects" that might have resulted from such projects, he said.

Another nearly might-have-been: Picture, in the middle of a map of Alaska, a manmade lake the size of Lake Erie. It would have taken three years to fill, and its dam of the Yukon would supply twice as much power as Washington's Grand Coulee Dam. Proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it would have cost $4 billion and had initial support from Ted Stevens and President John Kennedy, among many others.

"Rampart Dam - for a better lifestyle," said one sign at the dam site on the Yukon.

Merrell collected data on fish at the site of the proposed dam.

Rampart wasn't built because Ernest Gruening, a major supporter, lost his senatorial bid, Merrell said. But it also failed, he said, because there was no nearby market for the power; there was no local workforce to build it; it violated the U.S./Canada treaty by halting navigation on the Yukon and killing lots of salmon; it would have flooded and destroyed five Alaska Native villages; local and national conservationists opposed it, and so did the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for which Merrell worked.

Then there were the big explosions that did happen. Merrell also worked at the Aleutian island of Amchitka, noting the ecological effects of the government's underground nuclear warhead tests from 1965 to 1971.

And while Project Chariot never worked out, that doesn't mean the residents of Point Hope avoided effects from nukes. In the baseline studies for the project, scientists found residents' bodies already had elevated levels of radioactive strontium-90, likely from previous U.S. and Russian nuclear tests. The people ate a lot of caribou, which eat lichens, which concentrate airborne contaminants over many decades.

• Contact reporter Kate Golden at 523-2276 or kate.golden@juneauempire.com.