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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."
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.
Success rate does not illustrate simplicity, especially not with that small of a sample set. That could be the equivalent of saying, "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."
My work here is dung.
But could a large conventional blast do the same thing?
What was their alternative?
They didn't have firepower or mechanized armor that could match what the Germans had. But they did have many, many people.
Regardless, their technique worked. In fact, it worked so well that they alone were responsible for much of the damage that Germany sustained.
Their enemy also had Mussolini as an ally. The guy fancied himself the next Roman emperor and a military genius, and Germany routinely had to divert resources to bail him out. When Italian forces invaded Greece in 1941 it was rapidly pushed out, even losing territory it controlled prior to the attack; the German Twelfth Army had to be sent down to rescue it, depriving Germany of more than 150,000 men that could have made a difference in Operation Barbarossa.
Of course, the fact that Mussolini's senior officers were also incompetent (based on the perceptions of Erwin Rommel, among others) didn't help. Hitler wasn't the military genius he thought himself to be, either, but he had good officers that knew how to work around him until they were relieved of their commands.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Yes, by all means, let's punish the people who were *right*.
Right about what?
You are typing on a computer to tell me that I need to consume less energy? I bet you use electricity and drive to work, too. That resources need to be managed more carefully because of our overpopulation? Agreed. That people should be attacked/bombed/killed for it? Nope. That the Earth is warming and sea levels are rising? Agreed. Lying to people and ignoring this trend that has been going on for the past 100,000 years since the last ICE AGE - hmmm, nope.
Douchebag.
Well, I have planted over 500,000 trees. I own a managed forest that used to be scrub-land. Well I didn't physically plant them, I paid 175 people to do it for me. What have YOU done apart from re-cycle your tin cans? Stop being a hypocrite and start using your brain. It doesn't matter HOW MUCH we "conserve" if we don't stop breeding like rabbits, the J curve is going to happen. But in the mean-time I have a lot of hardwood to sell to humanity.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Using nukes to for mining purposes (and that's what this is, more or less) is nothing new.
The article mentions that the USSR used nukes some 169 times to create canals or underground chambers. Within the US there was Operation Plowshare, where Edward Teller (inventor of the hydrogen bomb) got the idea to use nukes to create large deep water harbors, open up mines, level pesky mountains, or even carve a straight and level road across the Panamanian isthmus. It was never tried other than some proof-of-concept blasts. Some folks thought it might not be such a good idea to set of nuclear weapons like demolition charges. Wimps - no sense of adventure.
Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I clicked on the "Read More ..." link expecting to find a discussion of the pros and cons of using nukes as engineering tools. And all I find so far is a discussion that should have been Godwinned out of existence long before it reached its current state.
Over the past half century, there have been some interesting proposals for engineering uses of nukes. One of my favorites was only a short distance south of the current record-setting oil spill: The proposed sea-level canal across Central America.
There have been several analyses of the possibility of such a canal. It could be much wider, deeper and cheaper than the current Panama canal, which is too small for many of the largest ships these days. Most of the proposed sites go across southern Nicaragua, where the passes through the mountains are lowest and widest. Several of the proposals amounted to burying a chain of nukes in a line through the area, and setting them off. The result would be a chain of interlocking craters with bottoms below sea level. A bit more work with large bulldozers to even out the shore line, and we'd have a canal.
There were various reasons why funding for these projects (through the US Congress, of course) was eventually rejected. One of the funnier ones came from research biologists. They pointed out that the Caribbean is a few meters higher than the east Pacific, so there would be a slow but significant east-to-west current in the canal. This would carry not just water, but lots of biological material, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. (The other direction would also happen, but would be limited to a few good swimmers).
The biologists thought this was too good a scientific opportunity to pass up, and started submitting grant proposals to do the Pacific-wide baseline population studies that would be needed to understand the ecological catastrophe that would follow. They argued that we missed a good opportunity by not doing the studies before the Saint Lawrence Seaway was built, so we were unable to track in detail the catastrophe that exterminated the Great Lakes' fishing industry, as the sea lamprey ate up all the fish in the lakes. They didn't want to lose out on all the valuable biological data that would follow the much larger catastrophe after the seal-level canal in Central America pumped thousands of new species into the tropical Pacific.
After enough of these grant proposals were submitted and Congress learned about them, the funding proposals for the canal were quietly "misplaced" and no longer discussed. Some of the biologists followed up by talking about their great disappointment that they would not be able to study such a large-scale biological "experiment". They didn't much lament the loss to engineers by the loss of a project to do large-scale nuclear construction, though I suppose in private a lot of civil engineers must have also been shedding crocodile tears over this loss to their profession.
Using a nuke on the BP well wouldn't do anything so biologically spectacular, of course. But I can see biologists hurriedly asking for funding to study the effects on the Gulf ecology. If it could be done right, we could get a lot of useful information out of the experiment.
Anyway, I'm still hoping to read lots of comments about nuclear construction ...
(Lessee; do I need a smiley to deflect the moderators who lack the humor gene? ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.