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Should We Nuke the Oil Well?
Blog
CBS
News, the
Christian Science Monitor, CNN,
Reuters and Fox
(and see this)
have all asked whether BP should nuke its leaking oil well.
Indeed,
some high-level Russian nuclear scientists and oil industry experts
have suggested such an approach to stop the Gulf oil gusher. Here
is archival footage of the Russians killing a gas leak with a nuclear
device.
And Obama's energy secretary and Nobel prize winning physicist Steven
Chu included
the man who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb in the 1950s as
part of the 5-man brain trust tasked with stopping the oil.
And oil
industry expert Matt Simmons proposes
the use of a tactical nuclear
device every time he is interviewed on national television.
However,
even the history of Russia's successful use of nuclear devices to stop
gushers has some important caveats.
As Reuters notes (unless new links are provided, links for all cited
articles are provided at the beginning of this essay):
Vladimir Chuprov from [Former long-time
Greenpeace's Moscow office is even more insistent that BP not heed the
advice of the veteran Soviet physicists. Chuprov disputes the veterans'
accounts of the peaceful explosions and says several of the gas leaks
reappeared later. "What was praised as a success and a breakthrough by
the Soviet Union is in essence a lie," he says.
Russian Minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist
Viktor] Mikhailov agrees that the USSR had to give up its program
because of problems it presented. "I ended the program because I knew
how worthless this all was," he says with a sigh. "Radioactive material was still seeping
through cracks in the ground and spreading into the air. It
wasn't worth it."
As the Christian Science Monitor points out:
The Russians previously used
nukes at least five times to seal off gas well fires. … Komsomoloskaya
Pravda suggested that the United States might as well take a chance
with a nuke, based on the historical 20% failure rate. Still, the
Soviet experience with nuking underground gas wells could prove easier
in retrospect than trying to seal the Gulf of Mexico’s oil well
disaster that’s taking place 5,000 feet below the surface. The
Russians were using nukes to extinguish gas well fires in natural gas
fields, not sealing oil wells gushing liquid, so there are big
differences, and this method has never been tested in such conditions.
As CBS News reports, not all of the Russians nukes worked:
But not each use of nuclear energy did the
trick. A 4 kiloton charge set off in Russia's Kharkov region failed to
stop a gas blowout. "The explosion was mysteriously left on the
surface, forming a mushroom cloud," the paper reported.
Indeed,
several experts have said that nuking the well might make the
situation worse.
For example, Reuters notes:
There is a chance any blast could fracture
the seabed and cause an underground blowout, according to Andy
Radford, petroleum engineer and American Petroleum Institute senior
policy adviser on offshore issues.
CNN
points out that nuking the leaking well could conceivably destabilize
other oil wells miles away.
The New York Times writes:
Government and private nuclear experts agreed
that using a nuclear bomb would be ... risky technically, with
unknown and possibly disastrous consequences from radiation ....
A
senior Los Alamos scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity
because his comments were unauthorized, ridiculed the idea of using a
nuclear blast to solve the crisis in the gulf.
“It’s not going
to happen,” he said. “Technically, it would be exploring new ground in
the midst of a disaster — and you might make it worse.”
And one of the world's top physicists - string theorist Michio Kaku -
writes:
I
think this is a bad idea, from a physics point of view. Let me say
that my mentor while I was in high school and at Harvard, Edward Teller,
father of the H-bomb, was a firm advocate of using nuclear weapons to
dig out canals and other grand engineering projects.***
Underground,
we then have a hollow sphere of vaporized gas, with walls that have
been glassified from the sand. This hollow sphere is stable from a few
hours to a few days, but eventually the weight of the rock collapses
the sphere. The result is a sudden collapse of the sphere, often
releasing radioactive gas into the environment.***
If
this takes place under the sea floor (which has never been done
before), there are bound to be complications. First, there would be the
release of dangerous, water-soluble chemicals such as radioactive
iodine, strontium, and cesium, which would contaminate the food chain in
the Gulf. Second, the "seal" created by the glassified sand is
probably unstable. And third, it might actually make the problem worse,
creating many mini leaks on the ocean floor. Determining the precise
effect of such an underwater blast would depend on crucial computer
simulations of the various layers of rock under the seafloor, which has
never been done before.
In other words, this would bea huge
science experiment, with unintended consequences. Furthermore, with
hurricane season upon us, and predictions of eight or more hurricanes
for this season, it means that seawater several hundred feet below the
surface of the water could be churned up and then deposited over the
South. This seawater, containing oils and radioactive fission products,
would magnify the environmental problem.
In summary, it is not a
good idea to use nukes to seal up oil leaks.
Moreover, former President Bill Clinton told
CNN on Sunday (starting 3:13 into video) that he has looked into the
issue, and that a nuke is not needed. He said the Navy can use conventional explosives to seal
the well. As the former commander-in-chief, Clinton is probably
getting such information from someone high up in the Navy.
For more on the nuclear option, see this.
»
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Radiation is not the danger from the use of nuclear devices, especially the rather puny ones proposed, under the seabed. The big danger is that the actual subsea-bed geology comes out worse after, than it was to begin with.
It would be a tragedy if the option of using a nuclear device was discarded merely because it is a nuclear device. Bill Clinton really needs to keep his mouth shut and defer to the engineers who are studying the issue. The Gulf of Mexico will definitely not turn into a nuclear wasteland under any circumstances, but the danger is very real that it will turn into an oily wasteland if a solution isnt found to this matter.
Well Billy Jeff does know a thing or two about plugging holes.
Truthfully though, They'll end up using explosives (nuke or conv. I know not). They'll have no other options as the reality of the damage in the gulf becomes untenable.
I agree. I think it will eventually come to "we have to do something"(tm), and we will all end up paying the price.
Luckily, we still Einstein's brain in a jar somewhere. I believe it's out on tour. They need to give The Brain some R n' R. Maybe get it laid or something. Then Nobel Prize winning Energy Secertary Chu can ask it a question, baby.
DeeDeeTwo, Bush brain is on same tour. Wait, lets do a headcount
We sure about whose brain is doing what?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ_pKqiB5Rg&feature=related
The only thing I can think of that might be more effective than intentionally nuking the leaking well might be to crash the Sun directly into the well head. That would stop that pesky oil problem for sure.
And it would be great irony too since the sun, via photosynthesis, is the real culprit behind all those leaking hydrocarbons anyway. Really gets to the "root cause" of the leak.
So you're saying use a hydrogen bomb?
Sweet.
hydrogen bombs rock!
They should use nuckes for every problem!
Financial crisis? NUKE WALSTREET!
Pension fund problems? NUKE THE OLD GREYS!
North Korea? NUKE'EM
China? WHY NOT?! NUKE'EM
The ozon layer? NUKE IT!
NUKE IT ALL! WHOEHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
you left out ex wives, dentists and cockroaches
Nuclear waste? Global Warming?
FUCK!! Stubbed my goddamn toe!
NukE tHE CHAIR!!
There's a Meme in there somewhere..
Nuke it Zero
NPR did a thing i saw tonite on the Van Allen belt. Turns out before they knew too much about it they had decided to nuke it and did to see how it would react. What if we had all died?
Friggen planet has a hole in it. I keep thinking ballons and pins. Earth loopy. I will drink to that by lighting a dooby. Thank god they haventh nuked the moon . Can you imagine the oceans without the tides.
Sure there is. The All American solution to every problem: take a gun and shoot somebody.
Are they mean to you at work? Take a gun and shoot somebody
Doing badly in school? Take a gun and shoot somebody.
Get cut off in traffic? Take a gun and shoot somebody.
Arabs hate you? Take a gun and shoot somebody.
Fed up with crooked politics? Take a gun and shoot somebody.
Civilisation as we know it collapsing? Stock up on guns and ammo.
Massive oil leak in the gulf? Take a gun and... no wait, take an ATOM BOMB and shoot somebody.
One day you´ll be kneeling before the trench and the thought will fly through your eyes, "Perhaps I should have had a gun and shot somebody."
Amen.
+ 5.7x28mm
In Russia, the oil well nukes you!
Yakov Smirnoff said so.
I think we should nuke the oil well sending a pressure wave up the New Madrid fault line causing a temblor to rival that of the Chile earthquake.
Sayonara Memphis, boo ya!
(Just blame it on the Taliban)
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/faq/?categoryID=12&faqID=88
Yea! I like where you are going with that. We'll do it at night when the Sun is cool.
Short the solars first.
we have the ability to destroy the world and are proving it daily.
PS i think the junker is an innocent, new to the site and doesnt understand sarcasm.
edit. ahh, 11+35 no minuses is just too easy and i miss the challenge. It also allows idiots like me to post. Good evening to all and best of wishes to our really screwed up future should we survive.
Happy 4th, merehuman!
Real Americans celebrate the 4th as a Declaration of War against tyranny.
Not yet! we don't even have a 'oil-well-leak czar' yet !
And mind you, Sun is too big to fail!
There you go Leo.[tag]
throwing another bone to Leo... unless this is the real Leo?
http://seekingalpha.com/article/212591-bullish-on-solar-stocks?source=yahoo
I knew green energy was superior to fosil fuels. LOL.
@Ken - who junked you? IMHO it was a funny remark.
I watched Clinton make that comment, and it looked like he was just talking out of his *ss to look well-informed.
Clinton pulled that out of his ass- Rubble won't seal this at 135,000+psi. A nuke will form an implosion, a leaking volcano. We need to know if the well pipe is ruptured! If it is, the relief wells intersect a hole in rock, not a pipe. The well "hammered" and Hal didn't use the required number of centering spacers, per BP to rush the cement casing pour. That means the pipe didn't have solid, even cement protecting it from the rock around it.
Yes, conventional isn't going to work, won't seal the reservoir and could cause other leaks and seeps. But Michio's points about nukes seem pretty well made, so apparently what we need is some galactic superglue.
We may be left with either nuking it -- which may fail and have other consequences, or letting it all dain out! If left with those two very bad options, I pick nuke.
just send over a couple of them daisy cutters
from Diego Garcia.