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Obama Sends Nuclear Experts To Tackle BP Oil Spill
An anonymous reader writes "The US has sent a team of nuclear physicists to help BP plug the 'catastrophic' flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from its leaking Deepwater Horizon well, as the Obama administration becomes frustrated with the oil giant's inability to control the situation. The five-man team — which includes a man who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s — is the brainchild of Steven Chu, President Obama's Energy Secretary." Let's hope this doesn't mean they actually try the nuclear option. In other offshore drilling news, reader mygoditsfullofdoom informs us that a Venezuelan gas rig has sunk in the Caribbean (with no loss of life). This one is being laid at the feet of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA, which hasn't exactly been regarded as uber-competent "after President Hugo Chavez fired half the company's managers and senior engineers following a 2002 strike."
Are they trying to plug the leak, or are they really trying to salvage the bore there and get back to pumping oil?
They're trying to plug the leak. At the same time, there's another drilling platform nearby drilling another well, which will be used to take the pressure off and get back to pumping oil. But that will take months.
Bear in mind that this is all going on a mile down. That's 160 atmospheres, and at that pressure, the water temperature is forced to 4C because that's the lowest density of water. Under those conditions, methane is a solid, and methane ice from escaping natural gas is clogging up the repair operation.
Once the hole is plugged, or at least slowed down, it takes about four months to four years for natural processes to dispose of the oil. The heavy components like asphalt sink; the light ones like gasoline evaporate off. Fishing and tourism might suffer for a while, but that's not a big deal.
As a far better article over at PopSci notes, the team includes a variety of physicists and engineers, only two of whom have done anything in the nuclear field.
While Richard Garwin did design the first proof-of-concept H-bomb way back in 1951, he spent most of his career at IBM, and held a symposium after the first Gulf War on how to close all those burning oil wells in Kuwait.
And although Tom Hunter has a couple degrees in nuclear engineering and is (until he retires in July) director of Sandia National Lab, his strengths appear to be more in the area of managing "big science" these days.
George Cooper, Alexander Slocum and Jonathan I Katz, though? Not nuke guys.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.