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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."
What could possibly go wrong?
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
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.
I don't think we have any orbital nukes. We would have to nuke it from orbit, as it's the only way to be sure.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What problems can't a nuclear explosion solve?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
...it's that any and all natural disasters can be stopped by the liberal use of nuclear weapons.
But could a large conventional blast do the same thing?
I'm trying to figure out which part of this story is the scariest.
... that someone has suggested setting off an underground nuke to close an oil well?
... finding out that the Soviets did this all the time?
... finding out that the USSR was so careless they had six "petrocalamities" worth trying this trick on?
... finding out that there's an actual word for an oil accident of this size?
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.
Duct tape can solve almost anything. I think they need to look into this a bit ... plus its very inexpensive
Back in the late eighties, when the world was turned upside down by the fall of the iron curtain. my friends and I speculated that the fact that Reagan had survived assassination* had torn a hole in reality, thrusting us into a Bizarro Universe.
Now we have Russians suggesting something that only would make sense in a really bad TV movie or potboiler eco-disaster novel.
Like the man uptopic says, what could possibly go wrong?
We're there, man.
Stefan
* Schoolyard mythology: presidents elected in years ending in 0 always died in office.
The Gulf of Mexican? Honestly? I mean come on...
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
As a pyromaniac extraordinaire I fully endorse this under one condition:
That a TON of high speed camera footage is available at no charge to me later. Outside of that I'm sold.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
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.
So in the US, controlled underground nuclear blasts would be plugged with oil leaks?
Nukes are small, cheap and very efficient.
Here is a conventional underwater explosion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_Rock
"Between November 1955, and April 1958, a three-shift operation involving an average of 75 men worked to build a 174 meter vertical shaft from Maud Island, a 762 meter horizontal shaft to the base of Ripple Rock, and two main 91 meter vertical shafts into the twin peaks, from which "coyote" shafts were drilled for the explosives. 1,270 metric tons of Nitramex 2H explosives were placed in these shafts, estimated at ten times the amount needed for a similar explosion above water."
A nuclear underwater explosion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wigwam
The difference, with a nuke you just put it down where you want it with a cable, or more likely, a ROV, stand back and detonate it.
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
What was their alternative?
Well, they were about to try the concrete dome aproach, but the germans refused to get under it. Aparently the cheese piece wasn't big enough or something.
This is just an excuse to Nuke the Whales.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Drill, baby, drill.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Know your history.
The Stalinist purges had decimated the upper ranks of the military leaving the entire military structure in shambles. Furthermore, Stalin himself chose to ignore critical intelligence about the timing of the German invasion.
So if it were not for the insane dictatorial policies of the Communists, the Russian army would have been in a much better condition to fend off the German attack.
That's what first comes to your mind when you hear about nuclear explosions on the bottom of the ocean? Waves?
What about wakin' the motherfuckin' Cthulhu man? YEAH!
I guess you feel really silly right about now.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, the Russians could have done what the rest of continental Europe did: briefly offer token resistance and then capitulate to save lives at the cost of their freedom. But the joke was on the Germans, USSR didn't have any freedom to lose!
This whole revisionism that swings the pendulum of near-complete responsibility for toppling Germany from the US to the USSR is just as wrong-headed as the original assumption. Do you really think the USSR could have survived a German military undivided by multiple fronts powered by an industry undisturbed by coordinated day and night bombing by the US and Britain? You might try telling the families of the crews of the 18,418 US aircraft lost over German-held territory how it was the Russians alone that did much of the damage. Lord knows that the nearly 1.7 million missions flown by the USAAF alone were just larks to go have tea on B-17s. Nevermind also that the US provided a significant amount of material support including wholly assembled aircraft and trucks to the USSR during WWII to supplement its initially crippled industry. The list goes on.
Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII, nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The mistake was using cheese for bait. They should have used beer and brats.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
We all know the real party responsible for Germany's defeat is Italy. If they had held the front in North Africa, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to North Africa. Had that front held, Sicily wouldn't have been invaded. Had Sicily not been invaded, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to Sicily. Had Italy not screwed up in the Balkans, Germany wouldn't have had to divert troops to Macedonia and Greece, and Operation Barbarossa would have gone ahead as scheduled, before Winter would have caught them off guard. In fact, Italian incompetence causing Germany to have to split forces and support multiple fronts over and over again is really what did them in. There wouldn't have been an Eastern Front by the time Overlord happened had Mussolini not tried to be Caesar but only managed being Sulla. Hell, Claudius even conquered Britain, and he was inbred and possibly retarded.
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.
Agh!
you know nothing of trapping a German..
Sauerbraten, a huge glass of Weizenbock, and a Kuchen.
Even Diter would be tempted....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The party responsible for Germany's defeat is Hitler. His failure to land troops in Britain and to start a (two front) war with the Soviets was what did him in in the end. Good fortune for the rest of the world.
If the Allies could not have a staging area so close in Britain, and there was no Eastern front, the Germans could have taken all of Africa.
What was their alternative?
I don't know, maybe not purging the leadership of your Army? Maybe letting Generals make the decisions instead of political commissars?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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.
Now this is the way to go fishing in the south.
Just line up the fish trawlers on one side of the Gulf and start scooping them off of the surface.
Fishing industry gets a bonanza and we seal a leak.
Oh, heck. Just drop a 48 tons of Creole seasoning in before the blast with a few hundred tons of corn and potatoes and we're done. We can just skip all the fisheries and just wait for dinner to come ashore.
But, I'll have to remember this next time we go fishing.
"No, sir mister warden. We weren't fishing with dynamite, we were just trying to plug an oil leak in the bottom of the pond"
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?
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.
Umh.. didn't have the firepower or mechanized armor? Ok, granted T34's were few and far between, as were KVs when the germans attacked. I'll even grant you that the BT models they had were inferior to the better german armor. However, the problem didn't really lie with not having enough mechanization. The russians had enough heavy tanks (KV) and good mediums (early T34) to give the german Mk.IIIs and Mk.IVs a run for their money. While BTs were clearly superior to older german armor, such as Mk.IIs or captured Czech stuff. The armor just was never used in a concentrated manner, allowing germans to destroy them piecemeal.
The problem the russians had on the tactical level was lack of/poor quality training for personnel and lack of experienced leadership due to Stalin's purges. Plus initiate of the officers was heavily curtailed by the dual command system, in which the Politruk had to approve all command decisions.
On the strategic level they suffered from Stalin's "Not one step back" type policies, which led to encirclements, which led to suicidal breakout attempts of mass surrenders (which led to mass deaths by starvation, etc). This in the beginning of the war.
Later on in the war the russians had a clear quantative lead and only a minor technical handicap in both airplanes and tanks, also with less restrictions from the political apparatus. Plus throughout the war they enjoyed massive amounts of artillery firepower, which has always been the unsung hero of the Red Army. Why did they still suffer huge casualties when they clearly had an edge in mechanization (not just in numbers, but in available ammo/fuel) compared to the germans and more experienced crews? Because the leadership simply didn't care about the human casualties as long as they gained the results Stalin was expecting of them. Men were simply thrown away in futile assaults, which then later had to be done "properly", just to see if they could break through without bothering to stop to build up.
Why the rush? Berlin.. Stalin wanted it for himself and feared the allies would get there first, despite promises that they wouldn't even try.
It's a long rant.. but the gist of it is: The Soviets had many chances to save lives during the war, they just chose not to.
It worked though, I agree with you there.
... and Greece stopped them with only 300 men.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Try beautiful girls with big boobs. That should work not only with Germans, but any army.
There were 27 so-called peaceful nuclear explosions in the US. one of the last in 1973 was supposed to fracture the ground in Colorado methane field to increase production. It has the contrary effect of melting a layer of glass underground and sealing off the methane. Russia used 115 bombs in similar tests . The seismic data they obtained is considered the best ever collected.
Even the Greek army? I think not.
Italy took a large part in the trench warfare of WWI. Who do you think fought Austria-Hungary? Pixies? I highly doubt that the 5 million Italian soldiers (of which more than half a million were killed) just evaporated with the morning dew after it was over.
You imply that Italy lacked hardware, as though Fiat didn't exist or any other vehicle manufacturers, as though Italy didn't have more battleships than you've had hot dinners, etc. You further imply that because Germany came up with the autobahn that makes them more special than the people who basically invented paved roads in the first place.
No experience in desert warfare? Italians had been fighting in the Horn of Africa since the 1880s.
I'm afraid you are insufficiently informed to make a cogent argument. Italy was a failure primarily for being unable to motivate its military and use its forces decisively and effectively. In terms of supply and experience they were on par.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
"the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn't work once."
I think the lesson that can be learned here is that you need to use 5 nukes all at the same time to guarantee success.
You know, just to be sure.
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.
How about putting an existing warhead into a pressure vessel?