August! August? Seriously. Has someone gotten fired yet?

I think August means drilling the parallel well to relieve pressure. The more dramatic solutions, like the top kill or the robot, were supposed to be faster.

navy is recommending a nuclear bomb be detonated in near the well:

http://www.businessinsider.com/two-deepwater-horizon-developments-to-expect-in-the-coming-days-2010-5 [www.businessinsider.com] ».

Next, the so-called "nuclear option" is about to get a lot of attention.
In this case, of course, nuclear option is not a euphemism. It's the real idea that the best way to kill this thing is to stick a small nuke in there and bury the well under rubble. Supposedly it's been done in Russia, and by the middle of the coming week, it will be all over cable news, as pundits press The White House hard on whether it's being considered and why not.

BP will probably get slaughtered in London trading on Monday. Apparently London has the day off, as well. So watch out for an ugly Tuesday.

It seems crazy, but.. Im somehow not instantly against nukes. Around the wellhead itself it probably melts the surface well enough to plug the drillshaft. Im not a geologist but it seems like there could be the threat though of opening fissures and this whole deposit leaking out all over the seafloor?

I think it'd be near impossible to get complete support for that. Obviously we all have no idea, but if this thing is spewing this much from a tiny hole, imagine what a big hole would look like.

Seems like if drilling "relief" wells is the only real solution then blowing a massive hole in the ground, hoping it'd fix things seems kinda crazy to me. And what else would the Navy have to offer anyway??


This is going to change the shape of energy pretty quickly. Might be painful at first, but seems like a good reason to promote alternatives. The "drill drill drill" mentality won't hold up, and if we are worried about terrorism, these isolated rigs seem like pretty easy targets.

it seemed to me that the nuclear bomb was used in russia for a completely different reason, that they had a gusher of natural gas that had been burning for three years and they couldn't figure out how to put out the fire so they could cap the well. the bomb just robbed the fire of it's oxygen and put it out. maybe for some reason it would work here? but it seems that the problem is completely different, as it isn't about putting out fires but stopping the flow.

it's not like the oil is just below the ocean floor.
a engineered explosion would disturb enough earth and rock that it would put so much mass over the well that it would effectively seal it.
one would hope.

also.. wouldn't a nuke blast fuse any sand (silicon) down there into a solid mass? so cap it by collapsing stuff onto it, and then seal the cap once the blast cools and solidifies into a single solid mass?

I think the real problem here are the methane hydrates. If the nuke blast ignites a chain reaction... boom..boom..boom..bye bye gulf sea-life.

I just realized that they're saying a total of 9 million barrels of crude have been released into the gulf over the last 45 days.

The US consumes something like 19 million barrels a day.

All this oil - sufficient to virtually destroy the Gulf, is not even a day's worth of oil use.

It's seriously unimaginable how much money, time, and resources America has invested in the automobile lifestyle. All of this in order to drive in circles everyday and live a more "pastoral" lifestyle.

I really hope this oil spill wakes us up!

Svensven... but the bible tells us to avoid city life at all costs! The city is the ultimate perversion of all mankind!

I think the suburbs more about racial inequality than pastoral lifestyle.
It's about running from diversity and expanding into indian land. Zionism is root of america.

Unicorn,

In other words, Dems/Libs live in the city.

So Michio Kaku was on Olberman last night and explained pretty succinctly why nuclear bombs are crazy in this instance. The idea is that the explosion creates a spherical cavity under the earth with a glacified silicate shell, hopefully including and sealing the wellhead. The problem is, after a day or so the cavity collapses and breaks the seal, leaving a potentially massive leaking hole of subsea rubble with fissures pouring oil out over a half mile area. Also, for fun, the oil coming out is now contaminated with radioactive waste, which slowly circulates all over the gulf and Atlantic and gets blown by hurricanes into every neighborhood within a hundred miles of the ocean and lasts for probably doesnt go away for 1000 years.


God I love me some Michio Kaku.

I don't really understand what is going on with all these oil gushing... but wouldn't it be possible just to stop all together all oil supply to the pipe, preventing it to spill continuously, clean up the mess, fix the empty pipe... why oil is still flowing through the pipe?

on a "wake up call"... if the US would spend as much $ on reduction of oil derived products use among general population as on anti-smoking campaigns... why not to ban automobile owners from bars and restaurants? why not to post pictures of oil-covered pelicans in every grocery and subway station with caption "YOU are responsible"?

Blaming BP for the spill is like blaming drug dealer for selling drugs: s/he wouldn't do it if it wasn't that profitable.

doza,

Imagine filling a balloon with water, pretty much up to it's capacity. Then put a pin prick puncture at the top of the balloon (the portion facing upward). Water will come out out of the puncture site despite that it's flow will appear to be against gravity. Simply put, conditions for the water inside the balloon are denser than outside, so water will come gushing out. The only way to stop that flow is to seal the puncture, divert the gushing water to somewhere it would be harmless or relieve the pressure inside the balloon.

rubber gasket seal over the pipe connected to hoses that fill up tankers...i dont see why this cant be done for the time being....shit isnt rocket science....

curious why they are trying to stop the leak if they can possible create a trap-like setup/bubble over the leak area.....

It is kind of like rocket science. The pressures here are pretty astronomical, a rubber gasket would just be blown off.

"why not to ban automobile owners from bars and restaurants?"

Actually Doza... that's not that bad of an idea!

Technically... cars, their effects on environment and lifestyle and the operation of said vehicles is the largest source of preventable death, disability and injury in the US.

I can think of a number of other measures - reduce zoning for gas stations. Without gas stations on every major intersection's corners, people would find driving more inconvenient I suspect. Make all lanes on highways, save one, HOV - carpool or sit in permagridlock. zone residential housing with parking maximums - 1 car per apt, say. Finally, put a meanngful tax on gas. Of course, any politician putting these measures into effect would have a pretty short career.....

This oil well catastrophe might bleed-out the reservoir -2 to 2.5 billion barrels into the gulf.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967

I think they (Beach Pollution) has accomplished the "Top Kill" now they're workings on destroying the bottom. Where is the anger........

that was emailed around today, that sounds great - way to go bush! i'd be stumping for wind, too, if i were him...

there is too much of a disconnect between (living in the burbs/driving an SUV/cheap gas/etc) and what is going on in the gulf. the things americans get angry about are usually things of little consequence to the real world.