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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."
...Who solved the East front issue throwing at it 20 million human lives.
What could possibly go wrong?
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
"Putting a man on the moon is so simple, in fact, that the United States has used their method once and it has never failed."
Only once?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
sounds perfectly safe, which such exhaustive data as a whole 5 attempts
I flipped a coin 5 times and it only came up heads once. The chance of you getting a heads when you flip it will be really small too.
Parent is totally incorrect. If capping the well was so simiplistic, it would have been done. The ultimate goal right now is to stop the leak. If there is still interest in the field, another well can be drilled later -- they will not be going through the same wellhead.
Collecting the oil appears to be necessary. If you set up a collection rig, you only need to stifle the pressure from the oil you don't collect. If you try to block it entirely, you need to block *all* the pressure. The latest attempt to cap the well failed due to pressure and buoyancy created by the well and its byproducts, even though it allowed some of the oil through for collection. Do you think an identical cap that tried to block it completely would be more successful? I'm not a fan of BP, but I don't think they're trying less plausible solutions solely to save themselves the cost of drilling a new well. Given the payouts the U.S. will likely extract to cover damages (legislation to raise the cap is already in progress, and their public promise to make good is hard to renege on), they're better off capping as fast as possible and drilling anew.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Drill, baby, drill.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
FTFY.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
To quote from 'I Robot' (to put on my nerd hat), "That, is the right question. There is too much of a knee jerk reaction to this proposition. Meanwhile many here see no problem with nuclear power. A nuclear detonation would be underground and away from the actual leak. The intent is to shift rock layers not break through and create a mushroom cloud. After many, many years of test detonations there is a lot of knowledge on how to detonate a device and keep it underground. In fact, given that we aren't currently glowing due to all the underground (and even above ground) nuclear tests that have happened around the globe over sixty years, I doubt there would even be a lot of radiation released.
If they could do this quickly, they could save tens of thousands of people's jobs (fishing, tourism, etc.) and millions, or even billions of dollars of clean up costs and lost wages. They could do this much faster than drilling a relief well as they wouldn't have to do significant side drilling. Before discarding the notion completely, it would be worth considering based on cost benefit analysis and not GW Bush type gut feeling. It might not be practical, but it worth asking the question in a rational manner before discarding it. This is a bad and extreme situation.
On a side note, California DOT once considered using a nuclear bomb to blast part of mountain to make it easier to put Highway 40 through. The U.S. did examine using nuclear blasts as a way to help extract natural gas but dismissed it since it irradiated the gas too much. However in this current case, they aren't trying to form reservoirs or extract the gas. They are trying to stop it from escaping by pushing on the rock (which doesn't seem to me to necessarily have to be extremely close to the out of control well, or even the reserves).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Yes, by all means, let's punish the people who were *right*.
Douchebag.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
How do we know it won't make the hole bigger?
Wow...after having JUST witnessed a discussion that pretty well demonstrates how NO SINGLE ENTITY decided the outcome of the war...you chime in with an equally absurd stubborn insistence that it was the fault of a particular singular entity. Have you learnt nothing?!?!?! All contributing forces decided the outcome...all the effects are dovetailed!!!!!!!
That's a 20% fail rate. Pretty bad odds if you ask me...
He didn't say he thought it would burn or explode, you said that. Your entire comment here is a rant against something you said to begin with.
"So Jamie, there's a myth in a Russian newspaper that says you can plug an oil well with a nuclear bomb"
"We've got that pile of U235 left over from the radiation myth episode, let's skip the mock-up and go straight to full-scale."
I'm pretty sure sausage and beer would work for the vast majority of stereotype Germans, and those are the ones we want to kill right?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
"And it only didn't work once."
I have a method that's much more effective.
Stuff the hole with former Soviet government officials.
You know, the ones who think an 80% success rate at stanching calamities is par.
Yes, your anger is clearly all about your respect for and command of science, and not at all about your particular political philosophy. Just a helpful hint, from a published scientist to a self-professed connoisseur of the art: perhaps you shouldn't rely on the words of (non-scientist) journalist Thomas "Six-Months-Until-Victory-In-Iraq" Friedman. (Another helpful hint: his Pulitzer was not awarded for his dominance in the field of organic chemistry.) I could recommend some actual practitioners of the scientific method for you to read, but alas they all have doctorates of philosophy, and thus somehow don't meet with your enormous respect for the profession.
Still, congratulations on your mastery of the shift key. Bag of douche.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Satellites all over the world and they still don't know with certainty which direction the hurricane will move in the next 24 hours.
And then you failed again by demonstrating a total lack of understanding regarding statistics (hint: short term variance != long term trend).
Bzzzt - disqualified. Carbon dating absolutely does NOT work that way. A CO2 molecule's age can ABSOLUTELY NOT be determined.
And then you failed a third time! Wow! This phrase:
Doesn't mean what you believe it means. It's a pop-sci, pablumized version of real science. Climatologists would never claim you can measure a "CO2 molecule's age", and the aforementioned quote doesn't say they do. That doesn't even make sense. It's referring to a method of inferring the source of a sample of CO2 by examining the relative concentration of carbon isotopes in sample.
Me, I will stick to REAL SCIENCE
Well, given you haven't even managed to grasp a basic understanding of chemistry and statistics, you'll forgive me if I doubt that claim.
So I'll say it again: Learn. Seriously. You're *definitely* not as smart as you think you are.
Errr, I think you might be missing something here. The treehuggers who have been opposed to the "Drill Baby, Drill" mantra of Sarah Palin & John McCain were right about this sort of scenario. Offshore drilling obviously isn't foolproof and safe, like the people who want to develop those resources have been claiming, and the consequences of the accident, whatever went wrong, seems to be well on its way to dwarfing any other human-caused catastrophe in history in terms of ecological damage.
Greenpeace may have a lot of extreme views, but in light of the catastrophe occurring down in the Gulf, their concerns regarding offshore drilling don't seem so extreme now, do they?
Just saying.
I don't see this as an all-or-none situation either. We can get our fossil fuels by drilling in areas where the consequences of mishaps aren't so catastrophic. Oil in land-based wells that fail goes up, and gravity pulls it back down within some radius. Then there is dirty dirt that can be scooped-up and hauled off for treatment. It can be contained and the damage mitigated. A spill in the ocean, well that's like someone having diarrhea in the pool.
//"Putting a man on the moon is so simple, in fact, that the United States has used their method once and it has never failed."//
A more accurate statement would be "Putting a man on the moon is so simple, in fact, that the United States has used their method seven times and it has failed only once." Not that anyone cares mind you.
Global warming is caused by all the straw men you're burning.
Isn't that what we have now?
Yes, er, other "problems". Like, er, let's stop the weather. Seriously. Climatology is OBSERVATION and INTERPRETATION. What the fuck do you think it is, precision science? Satellites all over the world and they still don't know with certainty which direction the hurricane will move in the next 24 hours. Give me a fucking break. Next you're going to convince me that a doctorate in philosophy has practical use in the world.
Climatology also involves modelling, and using observation to confirm or refute the predictions made by those models, leading to refinements of the models and more accurate predictions. Rather like many other sciences such as meteorology (yer actual weather forecasting), which although it has a lot in common with climatology is not the same (a bit like mechanical engineering and car repair)
Carbon dating absolutely does NOT work that way. A CO2 molecule's age can ABSOLUTELY NOT be determined. The "age" of CO2 in the atmosphere can ABSOLUTELY NOT be determined.
Not one molecule, no. But there are a slightly mind-bogglingly large number of CO2 molecules in every breath you take. The carbon isotope ratio of an atmospheric sample can indeed be used to determine the "age" of the carbon in that sample, in the same way that carbon dating works with archeological samples. The wikipedia article is a good place to start learning about this.
I have no vested interest in whether anthropogenic global warming is real, beyond wanting a future for my children not marred by wars over land and water. I however honestly can't see any way that burning large amounts of fossil fuels could not increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and as far as I can tell it is indisputable that atmospheric CO2 contributes to heat retention - that particular debate was settled over a century ago.
Your ranting about taxes and regulation should be directed at your government, as it irrelevant to what scientists measure (although what scientists measure is obviously very relevant to any regulatory regime - evidence based policy is superior to policy based evidence)