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Oil Leak Could Be Stopped With a Nuke
An anonymous reader writes "The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast, a Russian newspaper reports. Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: 'The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel.' It's so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn't work once."
I just happened to come across this a month or so ago and thought it was such a telling statement to Soviet engineering halfassery...
As an illustration as to why we should NOT follow Soviet engineering techniques, I submit Hell's Gate to you... (this thing has been burning for 40 years)
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEjoga1yrn0
A small amount of background: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63J4H120100420
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
For the US - the smaller "tactical" nukes went from 0.3, 1.5, 5, 10, 60, 80, or 170 kiloton explosive yield
Strategic nukes went from 170 kiloton to about 330 kiloton in the late cold war, with some larger bombs up to 9 and 25 megatons, 9MT was the most the US deployed on a missile and a 25MT dropped from a bomber, while the Soviets dropped a 57 megaton, their largest deployed was 25 megaton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons#United_States
So, if you were going to nuke an oil well, you'd use a tactical warhead like the W87
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87
300-475 kiloton yield and about 600 pounds.
Or a bomb like the B83
15-1200 kiloton
And for an illustration of why you should not follow American mining or waste disposal techniques, look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
This thing has also been burning for 40 years.
Stalingrad and Kursk were both over by the time the massive USAAF bombing campaign geared up. And there is no way in hell D-Day and the subsequent operations by the Western Allies could have succeeded if two-thirds of the Wehrmacht hadn't already been lying face-down on Russian soil. This is the reality: Russians did more and sacrificed more, by far, than any other people to stop Nazi Germany, and the numbers of troops and amount of materiel involved in the Eastern Front dwarf the entire rest of the European war combined. While it is literally true that "Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII," your follow-on assertion that "nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'" is an absurd denial of history.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You have no clue, and I don't know how you got modded "interesting".
Uncontrolled flow from a well is not a good thing for oil production. It *damages* the reservoir. It will cost them money to let it flow. I don't mean in the sense of environmental costs, rig costs, or even in terms of oil lost while it flows out (which is a small drop in the bucket compared to the whole field over its lifetime), I mean in the sense of barrels of oil they will be able to recover from this field once the problem is solved versus if things had gone right. They don't want it this way. They sure as heck do want to cap the well, and as soon as possible.
Unfortunately capping the well isn't as simple as welding something on the top or clamping something on there. The full fluid pressure from a few km below the sea bottom are immense. The blowout preventer is built to take it, but it's apparently broken or jammed open, and clamping something else on there to contain the pressure isn't easy when the oil is flowing out and equipment at the well head is trashed to varying degrees. The riser above the blowout preventer (BOP) is not built to contain the full pressure at formation depth because it would be crazy heavy to hang beneath the rig, and the BOP is supposed to prevent the riser from being exposed to the highest possible pressures.
The reason the "oil collection device" would only ever manage 85% of the well flow is that some of the flow is from other breaks in the riser (the pipe that was extending down from the sea surface to the bottom) that is laying in a twisted mess on the sea floor. They closed off one of the breaks along it, but another is still leaking some distance away from the well head. That other one is where the other 15% of the flow is, and although the priority is on the big one, they're apparently working to capture the smaller one with another collection device. The collecting device above the 85% at the BOP failed because unfortunately it clogged with hydrates. They're hoping to fix that by either adding methanol (like anti-freeze) and/or heating it.
Both of these collection devices run at the ambient sea floor pressures. They aren't built to stop the flow ("cap" the well) because doing so is extraordinarily difficult with broken equipment at the well head that can't be trusted to maintain its integrity if you confine the flow. You must understand that even broken as it is, the BOP is helping matters somewhat. The flow probably would be 10x higher if it weren't constricting the flow. Do you want it to break further? If they get desperate enough, they will try confining the flow next (that's what the "junk shot" is about -- clogging it up), but if the BOP comes off or something breaks in the shallow subsurface as the pressure builds up (i.e. a subsurface blowout), then the problem will be much, much worse, and you're going to wish they had NOT ever tried "capping" it. Can you imagine the outcry if the attempt failed and the flow increased to, say, 10000 or 50000 barrels/day? "Why wasn't BP more careful? Why didn't they just wait for the relief well?", they'll say.
They aren't going to do a riskier move before exhausting the safer/faster options first and making absolutely sure they understand which parts of the BOP and casing below can be relied upon. That takes time.
Let me put things in simpler terms. If a broken pipe in your house was slowly flooding your basement at an alarming but modest rate, and clamping something around the pipe had the real potential to BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE AND FILL YOUR BASEMENT IN 15 MINUTES if the clamp or the surrounding pipe failed in the attempt, would you be prompt about "capping" it rather than putting out buckets and a sump pump until you assessed the situation properly? They're trying to do this in more than 1000 metres of water, remotely. You have to move cautiously, try all the easier and safer options first, and be sure you aren't going to make it much worse.
But anyone who things that BP wants or prefers this well to "run wild" for the couple of months it will take for a relief well to be drilled is terribly uninformed and doesn't understand the nature of the problem or the economic impact of letting it do so.
It probably wouldn't have been like Britain, at least not for a while - Nicholas II was definitely "old school" as far as monarchs went and had zero desire to share power with anyone. The German Empire was closer to a constitutional monarchy than Russia was going into World War 1 and, thanks to Wilhelm II's idolization of the military, was basically a military dictatorship with a "representative" rubber-stamping committee in the Reichstag.
That said, Russia's military probably would've been in better shape going into '39 under Tsarist rule than it was under Stalin. Russia's military was undergoing a modernization program (increased mechanization, greater operational staff independence, etc.) going into World War 1 that was a few years from completion. If World War 1 started in 1917 instead of 1914, Germany wouldn't have had a poorly organized, slowly mobilizing, poorly equipped army of peasants on its eastern frontier - it would've had an impossibly large, well-equipped professional army backed by a relatively modern infrastructure (Russia was working on getting their railroads up to international spec, among other things) bearing down on it instead and Germany knew it. That's part of the reason Moltke and the rest of the German General Staff were in such a hurry to start World War 1; their window of opportunity, rather small to begin with, was closing fast. Instead of completing the modernization program, though, Russia's military was quickly chewed to shreds by the Germans (note that the Russian military, poorly run as it was, easily handled the Austro-Hungarians without serious issue), devoured what was left of itself during the October Revolution and its aftermath, then re-adopted the grand Russian tradition of promoting officers based on political considerations instead of tactical merit under Stalin; granted, Nicholas II wasn't much better than Stalin on that front, but at least he didn't make a regular habit of killing large portions of his General Staff whenever he came down with a case of the "vapors". Similarly, Tsarist Russia's economy wouldn't have had to suffer through the pre-NEP "War Communism" economy, nor through Stalin's abandonment of the NEP and the Holomodor. Of course, some of the resulting gains would've undoubtedly been lost in the Great Depression, but millions of displaced Ukrainian peasants probably wouldn't have starved.
Long story short, Nicholas II's "divine" leadership would almost certainly have been no worse for Russia and its military than Stalin's leadership ultimately proved to be.
Also, the "tanks on horseback" bit is actually a magnificent bit of Nazi propaganda - like most militaries of the time, horses were used for reconnaissance and scouting. Don't forget that small, inexpensive, reliable all-terrain vehicles were a rather recent development; full scale production of the Kübelwagen didn't begin until 1940 and the Jeep didn't enter production until 1941.