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BP Prepares Complex "Top Kill" Bid To Plug Well
shmG excerpts from the International Business Times: "Government and BP officials are hopeful after extensive preparations, but are not guaranteeing that a complex attempt early this week to cap an uncontrolled underwater oil spill from a well in the Gulf of Mexico will be successful. The so-called 'top kill' procedure that oil major BP is tentatively scheduled to attempt on Tuesday involves plugging up the well by pumping thick 'drilling mud' and cement into it. While it had been attempted on above-ground wells, it has never been tried at the depths involved with this spill, nearly 5,000 feet below the surface."
It's the only way to be sure.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
It was featured on the Colbert Report a few days ago.
I don't see why C4 or some other high explosive couldn't work, and indeed, it makes me wonder just exactly who is in charge of this thing.
They should have two separate teams, who know nothing about each others existence. One is drilling the relief well, the other is trying to stop it at the end. Hopefully, they'll work that much harder if they think they're the only team fixing the well, even though BP appears to have a very lackadaisical attitude about it, but then again, all of my news sources are satire.
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
Hilarious subject line for your post, since the process of "frac-ing" aka "fraking" the well is a production technique used to greatly increase flow rate, using explosives to crack the oil-bearing rock.
So, that's the question. Are we better off with a sharp huge release of the entire formation in one big gulp, or better off letting it slowly trickle out as we've been doing?
The other hilarious part, is nuke obsessed Americans never notice the only thing untouched in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was buried concrete and steel building foundations... You know, just like ... oil wells...
Other than being a big orgasmic kaboom, setting of a nuke would do either jack nothing, or make it much worse.
Also the kill well we're digging probably would need to be bigger to fit a nuke instead of pumping mud. So it'll go slower.
Oh, and we have no deep sea underwater nukes.
Other than that, great idea.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They committed perjury when they lied to Congress when getting permission to drill. They said they were ready for a spill of this size, and they weren't. That's sufficient, in my eyes, to start sending CEOs to jail.
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