Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.