without having set, tested plans in place in case of this sort of catastrophe.
Oh, they have plans. They're working like an anthill stirred up with a stick. Seriously.
What you meant to ask, but didn't, is why they don't have set, tested plans to fix this kind of thing "instantly" or "within hours" or at least sooner than its going to take.
Well, that's because no such technology exists. So you simply make failure impossible via paperwork. You need a perfect cement bond job, so you require one. You need a perfect and tested BOP so you require one. The odds of both failing at the same time are astronomical. Which, as you can see, does not mean its impossible, just very rare. I suspect we'll never see an identical failure, its just too unusual. Oh we'll see other failures, just not exactly like this.
Although he used the term "reduce the risk". There is always risk but this procedure seems the most logical one so far for all I know about oil well drilling.
1) Research the formation pressure vs the burst strength of the casing. They are way too close for comfort. Statically they're technically OK, before you collapse a drilling rig on top of them and have a month long blowout scour them from the inside out. Bad Slashdot Analogy : Its like using a racing engine, after its been in a crash, to power a fire truck. Its not like the theoretical burst pressure limit of the casing is a factor of 100x the internal pressure... They're cutting it close, maybe too close.
2) Contemplate that the root cause of the blowout was a cement bond failure... And cement is crazy weak in tension. So hooking up ultra high pressure pumps to push down extra hard, is not exactly the ideal situation.
So, the relief well is about 1/3 of the way done. It'll work no problemo. Top kill has a modest chance of working, a modest chance of failing without damage, and a modest chance of splitting the casing wide open like a sausage on the grill.
So its a simple game theory exercise:
Solution 1 has a 100% success rate but takes three months. PR folks will vaporize themselves waiting.
Solution 2 has a, lets say, 1/3 chance of doing nothing, 1/3 chance of success, and 1/3 chance of splitting the casing like an overcooked bratwurst, thus increasing the oil squirt rate by a factor of maybe 3. So leak rate is going to zero, stay the same, or increase perhaps a factor of 3, all equally likely.
Meanwhile the longer you wait, the lower formation pressure/leak rate drops. While at the same time sandstone is scraping out the inside of the BOP and casing making the leak larger. And both effects are very non-linear. So, it starts out very slow, gets very big, and gradually declines.
Some supercomputer or whatever calculated the optimum solution is : Wait until the relief well is about 1/3 of the way there. I have no idea if anyone in slashdot-land can replicate the game theory math that lead to that answer.
You totally picked the wrong optical hobby, dude
on
Scientific R&D At Home?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... lab, to astronomy, etc....
You totally picked the wrong optical hobby dude. Unless you live in some sort of paradise, its either going to be too cold, too hot, too rainy, too buggy, too cloudy, too windy for lightweight mounts, or bad temp inversions, about 99% of the time. Now, a microscope, on the other hand, maybe with a cam attachment hooked up to a PC, with some image analysis software, that could be big fun under any weather condition. And they both cost about the same, less than a car payment for junk, about a single monthly mortgage payment for the good stuff, and about one decent used car for used pro-grade hardware.
Also, we all look at the same sky. That means intense competition. But we all have different dirt and ponds. Yet another vote for microscope.
I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do.
Yeah well you're about to learn the hard part is not deciding what to buy, or even whipping out a credit card, the hard part is figuring out how you'll determine its something new. Pretty easy if you want to discover something new to you, look, an algae species I've never photographed before. Pretty hard if you want to darn near prove a negative, prove no human being has ever photographed that particular species of algae before.
Something New is not necessarily discovering a new individual thing. Something New might be using yer computer and some homemade software that emulates a red blood cell counter to chart the population of algae per sample vs... something, to make interesting predictions, or discover a new effect. Or turning your computer-microscope into the worlds weirdest spectrophotometer, to measure... something.
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?
On the other hand, one good thing about the astronomy hobby is the AAVSO, American Association of Variable Star Observers. You'd never guess that their URL happens to be:
Dont laugh. Blood types, a very simple version of one's gentic idnetity, is a major pseudo-science in Japan. You cant date someone of the "wrong type".
Oh for goodness sakes. Using all those complicated words to cover a simple topic.
"Skin color, a very simple version of one's gentic idnetity, is a major pseudo-science in the USA. You cant date someone of the "wrong color"." For certain values of "can't" and for certain definitions of whom enforces the "can't"
You got me there. I even got it right a paragraph or two above, failed 1 in 6.
Regardless, if you're "destroying the planet" "murdering the GoM" or whatever, a 1 in 5 failure rate is horrible compared to 100% effective tried and true mud-kill well technology.
Especially since you need to drill a special well for either "solution".
1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store.
Classic, ever repeated confusion of what "power" is. Unless you mean volts times amps, power is what you can do with it. An old mainframe can run a department of a small multinational corporation, maybe a large university, or perhaps a division of state government. We know this, because they did in fact do so, very profitably. You claim a dollar store calculator is more powerful. That means a dollar store calculator should be able to run, say, an entire multinational corporation, maybe multiple universities, or an entire state government. Oh wait, a dollar store calculator can, at best, slowly calculate someone's income tax, possibly correctly. I guess the old mainframe is more powerful after all.
When I worked at a mainframe shop in the late 90s I heard alot of similar tiresome comments... "Ha ha, mainframes, bet you didn't know my laptop can run NOPs faster than your mainframe can run floating point FFTs ha ha ha mainframes". At which point you simply tell them to put up or shut up, hand them a bus and tag cable, and have their infinitely "more powerful" laptop process 5% of the NYSE volume like our mainframes did, while supporting about 100K trader desks, a couple TB of tape robot storage, etc.
I wonder what a brand new ancient rad-hard cpu costs.
They're all kind of "ancient", by some definition. The BAE RAD6000 is at least 14 years old and they go for about 1/4 mil. Most recent launch was this February.
Some might consider the RAD750 to be "ancient" being about 9 years old. They retail about $200K. The TSSM is going to launch in a decade with one, at which point that CPU will be 19 years old.
The cost and licensing of the fault tolerant GPL LEON series is very confusing, so the cost is somewhere between GPL/free and "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox.
When I read that, I immediately thought that must be journalist speak with the intelligence level turned way down for the mass media. However, it seems to really exist:
"highest protection against... " Blah blah blah long list of unlikely events. But it seems to exclude the extremely likely event of landslides and avalanches.
The study consisted of 169 Cornell psychology undergraduates
Ah well there's the relevancy problem. "Everyone knows" the lawyers on both sides like juries full of gullible / uneducated people without pre-existing biases, so they always try to dismiss folks "in the business" like lawyers, cops, also intelligent folks like engineers, doctors, scientists. The odds that a psychologist makes it to a jury seem extraordinarily low, unless in a statistical anomaly the rest of the jury is absolutely packed with supremacists and retired cops so they ran out of quota of people to exclude.
So, it's kind of like a shocker of a lead story that when they're on juries, the space aliens from war of the worlds seem biased against earth-dwellers. So? Who cares? It'll never matter.
The "flat earth" hypothesis was an _amazing_ deduction at its inception. It was only off by eight inches declination for every mile.
Try measuring some shadows at local noon at different latitudes. Just a couple hundred miles and you'll get a result a heck of a lot more than fractions of a percent. Unless by bad luck your midpoint happens to be directly beneath the sun that day.
... we should just ignore all problems down the road!
Well, basically, yes. For two reasons.
Its very much like facing your own mortality, or mortality in general. Folks whom are a little further along the grieving path or however you want to describe it, tend to get tired of hearing people stuck at the "panic" and/or "bargaining" stage VERY loudly declaring their location on the path. To everyone before them on the path, they make no sense or at best are annoying. You're at the bargaining stage of the grief process, that's just great, and just why should everyone not personally connected to you care what stage you're at?
The other way its pointless, is modern american society is focused around generating fear of one issue to sneakily implement some completely unrelated policy. I think it sucks. Why feed the beast? If the only reason to pay attention and get scared is so some bastard can sneak in a block of net neutrality or put in airport scanners or something else equally irrelevant to the problem, then F them, ignore them. Being a coward, outside of wartime, used to merely be a moral failing, but now it causes actual active cultural decay. Going thru life as a coward is a mental disease like any other, and the politicians whom prey off those mentally ill constituents are just bastards, so don't play their game.
3. The smallest nuke that was historically deployed by the USA was the 155mm artillery shell. Conveniently already round, just like a well hole. And about 7 inches across. But I believe its officially out of the arsenal. You'll probably need a bigger hole, think goatse size gaping hole. But to kill the well with drilling mud, you only "need" like 2 inches or so diameter. So its going to take way the heck longer to drill the well to place the nuke, than to drill a simple mud-kill well. Why not shut the well down sooner by not using a nuke?
4. Before setting off the nuke, you need to backfill the hole all they way, or all you've made is a better constructed tap to leak out of. Why not shut the well down sooner by not using a nuke?
5. The best way to increase oil flow is to set off explosive charges in a well. A nuke is a heck of a big explosive. But I thought you were trying to plug the well, not make it flow more? If the nuke fails, the flow rate will be way the heck higher, but the conventional solution is risk-free.
6. Best results if you get the nuke within say 100 feet of the wellbore. Conveniently that was the best the Russians could hope for at that time with their crude (bad pun) directional drilling technology. Heck bad drilling is probably why 1 out of 6 (or whatever) tries failed. We can directional drill with pinpoint accuracy. Just two decades ago, directional drilling to hit a well and mud-kill it was interesting, but now its no big deal. Of course, the Russians couldn't intersect, so they compromised and used a big nuke instead. But we don't need the nuke, because we can intercept the bore no problemo... Why add the extra step of the nuke, after a perfectly adequate modern American directional boring job already killed the well?
7. Nuke only worked 1 in 6 times. Intercepting and mud-killing the well always works 100% of the time, very old tried and true technology. Nuke is much more risky, and the last thing this needs is increased chance of failure.
8. If the nuke fails, all hope is realistically lost of ever controlling the well. The formation will drain out before we can get in there, repair the damage from the nuke, and try to plug. Very high stakes and the casino has rigged the odds against us. A fools wager.
So the nuke is slower, more expensive, failure mode is incredibly dangerous, much less reliable... Why use a nuke again?
And one of the major concerns with this oil spill is that it is depleting the oxygen - possibly leading to the creation of a dead zone.
I thought the GoM was already a giant dead zone from all the fertilizer leaking down the Mighty Mississippi? I could swear I've seen satellite pics of the GoM with giant black dead zones.
With regards to pressurizing and air conditioning:
If by mostly invariant you mean free on a turbine plane.
If the engines are running you get these two at no cost. They are waste products of the turbine.
So... you're not an airframe and powerplant mechanic? I don't think you'd like either the chemical composition or temperature of "waste products of the turbine stage".
If you could move and cool air for free, my local electric company would be somewhat poorer in the summer... Jet fuel is even less efficient that burning coal, and doing it on a flying power plant, even less so.
That means the 8 hour flightplan makes 3 trips per day. And the 10 hour flightplan (drumroll as slashdotters get out their HP-48 calculators) makes 2.4 flights per day.
Your just pulling numbers out of your ass
Actually, I store my calculator in my desk drawer. You're giving us waaaay too much information.
Slashdot Mirror
without having set, tested plans in place in case of this sort of catastrophe.
Oh, they have plans. They're working like an anthill stirred up with a stick. Seriously.
What you meant to ask, but didn't, is why they don't have set, tested plans to fix this kind of thing "instantly" or "within hours" or at least sooner than its going to take.
Well, that's because no such technology exists. So you simply make failure impossible via paperwork. You need a perfect cement bond job, so you require one. You need a perfect and tested BOP so you require one. The odds of both failing at the same time are astronomical. Which, as you can see, does not mean its impossible, just very rare. I suspect we'll never see an identical failure, its just too unusual. Oh we'll see other failures, just not exactly like this.
They will and are already paying.
As they should....
Correction, "they" are not paying. They simply sell gas to us at a higher cost. "we" are paying.
Although he used the term "reduce the risk". There is always risk but this procedure seems the most logical one so far for all I know about oil well drilling.
1) Research the formation pressure vs the burst strength of the casing. They are way too close for comfort. Statically they're technically OK, before you collapse a drilling rig on top of them and have a month long blowout scour them from the inside out. Bad Slashdot Analogy : Its like using a racing engine, after its been in a crash, to power a fire truck. Its not like the theoretical burst pressure limit of the casing is a factor of 100x the internal pressure... They're cutting it close, maybe too close.
2) Contemplate that the root cause of the blowout was a cement bond failure... And cement is crazy weak in tension. So hooking up ultra high pressure pumps to push down extra hard, is not exactly the ideal situation.
So, the relief well is about 1/3 of the way done. It'll work no problemo. Top kill has a modest chance of working, a modest chance of failing without damage, and a modest chance of splitting the casing wide open like a sausage on the grill.
So its a simple game theory exercise:
Solution 1 has a 100% success rate but takes three months. PR folks will vaporize themselves waiting.
Solution 2 has a, lets say, 1/3 chance of doing nothing, 1/3 chance of success, and 1/3 chance of splitting the casing like an overcooked bratwurst, thus increasing the oil squirt rate by a factor of maybe 3. So leak rate is going to zero, stay the same, or increase perhaps a factor of 3, all equally likely.
Meanwhile the longer you wait, the lower formation pressure/leak rate drops. While at the same time sandstone is scraping out the inside of the BOP and casing making the leak larger. And both effects are very non-linear. So, it starts out very slow, gets very big, and gradually declines.
Some supercomputer or whatever calculated the optimum solution is : Wait until the relief well is about 1/3 of the way there.
I have no idea if anyone in slashdot-land can replicate the game theory math that lead to that answer.
Seriously, they have some great biological modules to investigate ;)
Sounds like fun but I found:
Conflicts: wife (>= 1.0)
Suggests: Whole-bunch-of-money
Also the installation process took too much time.
... lab, to astronomy, etc....
You totally picked the wrong optical hobby dude. Unless you live in some sort of paradise, its either going to be too cold, too hot, too rainy, too buggy, too cloudy, too windy for lightweight mounts, or bad temp inversions, about 99% of the time. Now, a microscope, on the other hand, maybe with a cam attachment hooked up to a PC, with some image analysis software, that could be big fun under any weather condition. And they both cost about the same, less than a car payment for junk, about a single monthly mortgage payment for the good stuff, and about one decent used car for used pro-grade hardware.
Also, we all look at the same sky. That means intense competition. But we all have different dirt and ponds. Yet another vote for microscope.
I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do.
Yeah well you're about to learn the hard part is not deciding what to buy, or even whipping out a credit card, the hard part is figuring out how you'll determine its something new. Pretty easy if you want to discover something new to you, look, an algae species I've never photographed before. Pretty hard if you want to darn near prove a negative, prove no human being has ever photographed that particular species of algae before.
Something New is not necessarily discovering a new individual thing. Something New might be using yer computer and some homemade software that emulates a red blood cell counter to chart the population of algae per sample vs ... something, to make interesting predictions, or discover a new effect. Or turning your computer-microscope into the worlds weirdest spectrophotometer, to measure ... something.
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?
On the other hand, one good thing about the astronomy hobby is the AAVSO, American Association of Variable Star Observers. You'd never guess that their URL happens to be:
http://www.aavso.org/
One icon we all don't want to see... the goatse icon...
Give me the BSD License or give me...
No, not death...
What's the other one?
Freedom?
Dont laugh. Blood types, a very simple version of one's gentic idnetity, is a major pseudo-science in Japan. You cant date someone of the "wrong type".
Oh for goodness sakes. Using all those complicated words to cover a simple topic.
"Skin color, a very simple version of one's gentic idnetity, is a major pseudo-science in the USA. You cant date someone of the "wrong color"." For certain values of "can't" and for certain definitions of whom enforces the "can't"
If water isn't good enough, what is better?
Oxygen? Extremely long chained hydrocarbons?
Protection Against Threats Real, Imagined or Theoretical.
How well does it intercept bombs in standard 40 foot shipping containers? Thats the "delivery vehicle of the future".
You got me there. I even got it right a paragraph or two above, failed 1 in 6.
Regardless, if you're "destroying the planet" "murdering the GoM" or whatever, a 1 in 5 failure rate is horrible compared to 100% effective tried and true mud-kill well technology.
Especially since you need to drill a special well for either "solution".
1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store.
Classic, ever repeated confusion of what "power" is. Unless you mean volts times amps, power is what you can do with it. An old mainframe can run a department of a small multinational corporation, maybe a large university, or perhaps a division of state government. We know this, because they did in fact do so, very profitably. You claim a dollar store calculator is more powerful. That means a dollar store calculator should be able to run, say, an entire multinational corporation, maybe multiple universities, or an entire state government. Oh wait, a dollar store calculator can, at best, slowly calculate someone's income tax, possibly correctly. I guess the old mainframe is more powerful after all.
When I worked at a mainframe shop in the late 90s I heard alot of similar tiresome comments... "Ha ha, mainframes, bet you didn't know my laptop can run NOPs faster than your mainframe can run floating point FFTs ha ha ha mainframes". At which point you simply tell them to put up or shut up, hand them a bus and tag cable, and have their infinitely "more powerful" laptop process 5% of the NYSE volume like our mainframes did, while supporting about 100K trader desks, a couple TB of tape robot storage, etc.
I wonder what a brand new ancient rad-hard cpu costs.
They're all kind of "ancient", by some definition. The BAE RAD6000 is at least 14 years old and they go for about 1/4 mil. Most recent launch was this February.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000
Some might consider the RAD750 to be "ancient" being about 9 years old. They retail about $200K. The TSSM is going to launch in a decade with one, at which point that CPU will be 19 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
The cost and licensing of the fault tolerant GPL LEON series is very confusing, so the cost is somewhere between GPL/free and "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON
To some extent you can just go to the wikipedia rad hardened CPU page and pick and choose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Radiation-hardened_microprocessors
It's like all the wolves of the world unite to divide and concur the rest of us sheep.
No thats the European Union. Or maybe NATO. The UN?
at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox.
When I read that, I immediately thought that must be journalist speak with the intelligence level turned way down for the mass media. However, it seems to really exist:
http://www.swissfortknox.ch/swissfortknox-english/index.html
"highest protection against ... " Blah blah blah long list of unlikely events. But it seems to exclude the extremely likely event of landslides and avalanches.
The study consisted of 169 Cornell psychology undergraduates
Ah well there's the relevancy problem. "Everyone knows" the lawyers on both sides like juries full of gullible / uneducated people without pre-existing biases, so they always try to dismiss folks "in the business" like lawyers, cops, also intelligent folks like engineers, doctors, scientists. The odds that a psychologist makes it to a jury seem extraordinarily low, unless in a statistical anomaly the rest of the jury is absolutely packed with supremacists and retired cops so they ran out of quota of people to exclude.
So, it's kind of like a shocker of a lead story that when they're on juries, the space aliens from war of the worlds seem biased against earth-dwellers. So? Who cares? It'll never matter.
However, once my wife enters the room, it becomes non-safe.
On second thought, that's probably an accurate interpretation.
Oh that's awkward alright, but its even worse when Mom walks into the room, given the purpose of the site. Now, that's "nonfamily safe".
basement dwelling fat people.
Aka "trolls" on at least two levels. Maybe three if they're WoW/RPG players.
So, who's gonna register "troll-life.com" or whatever, point it to slashdot.org, and submit some google ads?
The "flat earth" hypothesis was an _amazing_ deduction at its inception. It was only off by eight inches declination for every mile.
Try measuring some shadows at local noon at different latitudes. Just a couple hundred miles and you'll get a result a heck of a lot more than fractions of a percent. Unless by bad luck your midpoint happens to be directly beneath the sun that day.
Some leftist parties don't think so. Instead they suggest an affirmative action in order to give matter and antimatter equal opportunities.
Forced integration. Implying that's not going to end well would be highly politically incorrect.
... we should just ignore all problems down the road!
Well, basically, yes. For two reasons.
Its very much like facing your own mortality, or mortality in general. Folks whom are a little further along the grieving path or however you want to describe it, tend to get tired of hearing people stuck at the "panic" and/or "bargaining" stage VERY loudly declaring their location on the path. To everyone before them on the path, they make no sense or at best are annoying. You're at the bargaining stage of the grief process, that's just great, and just why should everyone not personally connected to you care what stage you're at?
The other way its pointless, is modern american society is focused around generating fear of one issue to sneakily implement some completely unrelated policy. I think it sucks. Why feed the beast? If the only reason to pay attention and get scared is so some bastard can sneak in a block of net neutrality or put in airport scanners or something else equally irrelevant to the problem, then F them, ignore them. Being a coward, outside of wartime, used to merely be a moral failing, but now it causes actual active cultural decay. Going thru life as a coward is a mental disease like any other, and the politicians whom prey off those mentally ill constituents are just bastards, so don't play their game.
3. The smallest nuke that was historically deployed by the USA was the 155mm artillery shell. Conveniently already round, just like a well hole. And about 7 inches across. But I believe its officially out of the arsenal. You'll probably need a bigger hole, think goatse size gaping hole. But to kill the well with drilling mud, you only "need" like 2 inches or so diameter. So its going to take way the heck longer to drill the well to place the nuke, than to drill a simple mud-kill well. Why not shut the well down sooner by not using a nuke?
4. Before setting off the nuke, you need to backfill the hole all they way, or all you've made is a better constructed tap to leak out of. Why not shut the well down sooner by not using a nuke?
5. The best way to increase oil flow is to set off explosive charges in a well. A nuke is a heck of a big explosive. But I thought you were trying to plug the well, not make it flow more? If the nuke fails, the flow rate will be way the heck higher, but the conventional solution is risk-free.
6. Best results if you get the nuke within say 100 feet of the wellbore. Conveniently that was the best the Russians could hope for at that time with their crude (bad pun) directional drilling technology. Heck bad drilling is probably why 1 out of 6 (or whatever) tries failed. We can directional drill with pinpoint accuracy. Just two decades ago, directional drilling to hit a well and mud-kill it was interesting, but now its no big deal. Of course, the Russians couldn't intersect, so they compromised and used a big nuke instead. But we don't need the nuke, because we can intercept the bore no problemo... Why add the extra step of the nuke, after a perfectly adequate modern American directional boring job already killed the well?
7. Nuke only worked 1 in 6 times. Intercepting and mud-killing the well always works 100% of the time, very old tried and true technology. Nuke is much more risky, and the last thing this needs is increased chance of failure.
8. If the nuke fails, all hope is realistically lost of ever controlling the well. The formation will drain out before we can get in there, repair the damage from the nuke, and try to plug. Very high stakes and the casino has rigged the odds against us. A fools wager.
So the nuke is slower, more expensive, failure mode is incredibly dangerous, much less reliable... Why use a nuke again?
And one of the major concerns with this oil spill is that it is depleting the oxygen - possibly leading to the creation of a dead zone.
I thought the GoM was already a giant dead zone from all the fertilizer leaking down the Mighty Mississippi? I could swear I've seen satellite pics of the GoM with giant black dead zones.
With regards to pressurizing and air conditioning:
If by mostly invariant you mean free on a turbine plane.
If the engines are running you get these two at no cost. They are waste products of the turbine.
So... you're not an airframe and powerplant mechanic? I don't think you'd like either the chemical composition or temperature of "waste products of the turbine stage".
If you could move and cool air for free, my local electric company would be somewhat poorer in the summer... Jet fuel is even less efficient that burning coal, and doing it on a flying power plant, even less so.
That means the 8 hour flightplan makes 3 trips per day. And the 10 hour flightplan (drumroll as slashdotters get out their HP-48 calculators) makes 2.4 flights per day.
Your just pulling numbers out of your ass
Actually, I store my calculator in my desk drawer. You're giving us waaaay too much information.