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BP Says "Top Kill" Operation Has Failed
MrShaggy sends a quote from a CBC story: "BP has scuttled the 'top kill' procedure of shooting heavy drilling mud into its blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico after it failed to plug the leak. BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters on Saturday that over the last three days, the company has pumped more than 30,000 barrels of mud and other materials down the well but has not been able to stop the flow. 'These repeated pumping[s], we don't believe will likely achieve success, so at this point it's time to move to the next option,' Suttles said."
The answer is to accept that it is poison (instead of the pretence that nuclear runs on magic beans), and to build small units such as pebble bed where the consequences of failure are a lot less than the 1970s dinosaurs painted green that the US nuclear lobby want to build.
There is a good reason why plants to the "latest design" have no problems, it's because most of those are completely imaginary nuclear plants that were never built. Real ones are slowly falling apart and getting decomissioned before major problems occur.
The obvious answer is to build prototypes of the new designs and go from there until there is something possibly even commercially viable. Some of the smaller systems that are still in development even have the possible advantage of very short construction times and mass production - so the things could potentially be ready and running in less time than the decade or more (ask the swedes for how much more) that it takes to build one of the 1970s designs painted green that are being flogged off as "new technology".
Nuke the hole, bury with concrete. Tried and tested and known to work.
How long is Obama going to sit by and let BP try lots of experimental procudures which could all make things worse when he's been sitting on a known solution all this time?
BP knew for a fact theirs didn't work and ignored it.
You need to add a cite when you state something that ridiculous.
BP knew they had a problem when they brought huge chunks of rubber and again ignored it to continue drilling.
You must either have, or be quoting someone with, no industry experience at all. They call them "pigs" but they're basically big rubber stoppers with some molded in scrapers. After you pour in the cement, you put this (usually) rubber stopper on top and then push the works down the hole using the mud pumps. That makes sure there is no cement stuck in the bore. Not surprisingly, you drill thru the pig once you start drilling again. Not surprisingly there is all manner of rubber junk brought to the surface. There is actually an interesting way to fix this problem, by passing some sort of international UN binding law that annular BOP confinement rings may only be manufactured with yellow seal material and pigs/plugs/etcs may only be manufactured with, let say, red seal material. It has to be international in scope or else the contractor whom last worked in Saudi where all the pigs (err, sorry for kosher joke) are yellow, so when he sees yellow seal material floating in the mud tank his reaction would be "eh just a drilling pig".
The worst part, is when everyone on the rig is highly specialized, if some laborer sees "stuff" in the mud tank, his opinion about it isn't worth a whole heck of a lot more than the average dude on the street, because of that high level of specialization.
They knew they were engaged in risky behavior, they cut dozens of corners, shaved the rules, lied about their problems, and did anything at all to cut their expense and increase their profit.
And thats different from every other person and every other company that has ever existed, exactly how? Careful throwing those bricks in your glass house. Ah, you go first...
I think it's only fair to invite them to leave the country permanently
Who, the suits at BP whom frankly are more of a financing shell company (like GE or to some extent the old GM), or the american and foreign contractors whom actually did the work that failed, or the govt regulator types that can't be everywhere all the time? Your plan does seem like a very efficient way to remove all the personnel with experience with these problems who also have a high level of motivation not to make the same mistake twice, so in the long term, I think your plan for revenge will come back to bite you.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Ah yes, the 'conspiracy of rich oil companies bought up all the secret plans' meme.
Silly.
There is a solution, but since it involves nukes we'll never do it.
The only reason it is possible to keep about 80% of the US population ... well alive ... is oil.
That's just the poor fucks who live in the city. I could plant enough food to feed my family out here with simple seed. I have the hand tools to harvest it. I could replace my electric jet pump with a hand pump for water.
All those suckers who live in the blue states on the coasts are fucked, though. Enjoy your culture, I guess.
Has anybody told you you're kind of cute when you're angry?
They haven't?
Or until we triple the taxes on oil. Use the revenue to promote energy alternatives.
Too bad the people doesn't control the tax rate. Big corporations do.
I'm hijacking this portion of the thread in order to say you should check out The Oil Drum, where a lot of subject-matter experts discuss the progress of fixing the BOP and other BOP-related issues.
This is definitely a plug for this site, and I'm sure there will be others along shortly who agree the above site is wholly worthwhile.
I don't really agree.... What I mean is, we the consumers simply have energy needs for the things we use in daily life. The only logical course of action is to go with whichever options are readily available to use and at the lowest cost. I don't think I "owe" the nation, the world, or anyone else some sort of obligation to ignore the standards currently in use, and pay FAR more to use an alternative.
It's not that we have a "desire to consume oil". We have a desire to retain a certain standard of living. Without oil, truck, rail and air deliveries of goods come to a halt. Transportation as we know it stops. That alone is a critical blow ... not even factoring in things like people's need for climate control in their dwellings.
And "carbon credits" and all this other "Green initiative" stuff? Mark my words.... it's a lot of "feel good" nonsense for the general public to eat up, and a big profit center for others. It won't amount to a hill of beans at addressing any real issues. A lot of people who are unemployed or underemployed right now are salivating at the prospects of finding high paying new jobs in one of these govt. mandated "Green" industries. But it's artificially sensible.... (EG. We have a construction company in town called Alberici. A while back, they made local news headlines everywhere when they put up a big wind turbine and started bragging out their environmentally efficient new building. The "Green" advocates hailed it as a great move that more businesses needed to follow, etc. In reality? They mainly did it to score a big tax credit and some free P.R. The thing was so expensive to implement and returns relatively little payback on electricity savings - it's not really practical for purely what it DOES for them. Someone recently interviewed their management, asking if they were considering putting up a second one, and they sort of laughed, and said "No plans right now.") If it wasn't for govt. making tax credits or paying subsidies to keep these things afloat, they simply wouldn't make any economic sense to do.