“Should BP Nuke Its Leaking Well?”
July 3rd, 2010Detonating Nuclear Bomb at BP Oil Spill Site… Might Produce a Bad Result
Via: Reuters:
His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former long-time Russian Minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP’s oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
“A nuclear explosion over the leak,” he says nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. “I don’t know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and the problem is solved.”
A nuclear fix to the leaking well has been touted online and in the occasional newspaper op-ed for weeks now. Washington has repeatedly dismissed the idea and BP execs say they are not considering an explosion — nuclear or otherwise. But as a series of efforts to plug the 60,000 barrels of oil a day gushing from the sea floor have failed, talk of an extreme solution refuses to die.
For some, blasting the problem seems the most logical answer in the world. Mikhailov has had a distinguished career in the nuclear field, helping to close a Soviet Union program that used nuclear explosions to seal gas leaks. Ordinarily he’s an opponent of nuclear blasts, but he says an underwater explosion in the Gulf of Mexico would not be harmful and could cost no more than $10 million. That compares with the $2.35 billion BP has paid out in cleanup and compensation costs so far. “This option is worth the money,” he says.
And it’s not just Soviet boffins. Milo Nordyke, one of the masterminds behind U.S. research into peaceful nuclear energy in the 1960s and ’70s says a nuclear explosion is a logical last-resort solution for BP and the government. Matthew Simmons, a former energy adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush and the founder of energy investment-banking firm Simmons & Company International, is another calling for the nuclear option.
Even former U.S. President Bill Clinton has voiced support for the idea of an explosion to stem the flow of oil, albeit one using conventional materials rather than nukes. “Unless we send the Navy down deep to blow up the well and cover the leak with piles and piles and piles of rock and debris, which may become necessary … unless we are going to do that, we are dependent on the technical expertise of these people from BP,” Clinton told the Fortune/Time/CNN Global Forum in South Africa on June 29.
Clinton was picking up on an idea mooted by Christopher Brownfield in June. Brownfield is a one-time nuclear submarine officer, a veteran of the Iraq war (he volunteered in 2006) and now a nuclear policy researcher at Columbia University. He is also one of a number of scientists whose theories rely not on nuclear bombs — he did toy with that thought for a while — but on conventional explosives that would implode the well and, if not completely plug it with crushed rock, at least bring the flow of oil under control. “It’s kind of like stepping on a garden hose to kink it,” Brownfield says. “You may not cut off the flow entirely but it would greatly reduce the flow.”
I liked the pump-air-underneath-the-leak-to-push-the-oil-to-the-surface-quickly-where-it-can-get-sucked-up idea.
FREEZE THE OIL LEAKS!!
I live in the northern areas of Houston. Forests for the most part. And this morning the distinct smell of petrochemicals after many hours of rain brough on by the hurricane. Yes, it has been a strange weekend.
Fireworks going off everywhere, my wife and I grilling on the deck …
Drinking wine tonight and talking about home made ice cream on the 4th of July … what if the area could be contained and frozen?
Freeze the area around the leaks … the frozen methane could use the enhancements .. then pack on the tons of mud after the initial freeze?
Seems others of like mind are thinking the same thing? Instead of a nuke that would fry and fracture the geology?
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/Orange-County-Man-Has-Unique-Idea-To-Freeze-Oil-Leak-95979049.html
Lindsey’s ancestors were once part of the great Kansas oil boom in the 1900s. Years later he remembers his father using dry ice to clean up oil spills at their Pomona gas station.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/business-operations/project-management/OPS_PRJ/682756-30543809
http://www.suggestions4obama.com/2010/06/15/to-stop-the-oil-leak-quickly-freeze-it-read-how-below/
Somehow this idea reminds me of the 18 wheeler getting stuck under a highway bridge … all the ‘king’s men’ and all the ‘king’s horses’ and all the EMS and police
personnel could not figure out the mess … a little boy came up to them and told them to
let some of the air out of the tires on the truck and trailer!!!!
Could it be that elegant? Freeze the structure underneath the armada in the Gulf of Mexico?
Right. A huge cloud of methane gas trapped in the deep waters and you want to nuke it? You flucking “scientists” are NUTS.
Wonder if any of these “armchair” albeit experts know exactly what “kind” of explosion nukes plus a potential methanesubstrate gas cloud deep in the ocean would create?
All of sudden, everyone one is an expert. about how to stop this leak. This leak would not have happened if BP had been banned from drilling for oil on this planet maybe with their 100th violation of the rules. But I guess they have about 750 violations of environmenal law under their belt.
NICE.
At a family gathering last weekend someone said to me that is so SAD that so many people have been investing in BP and have included them in their pension fund portfolios because they have paid such good dividends, and now their pension funds are going to lose money. I couldn’t believe my ears, but then again I heard it.
I guess all I can say is I don’t pity BP one iota. They’ve been playing fast against the RULES for a LONG TIME NOW and everyone has been giving them A LONG ROPE because they payout a dividend.
I’d purging my ledger BP right now so fast and furious around the world right now if I only had a brain. Suckers, all of you. who have bought into the BP SOB story. Its another Enron. I;d say yes, this is an advisement to get out of this financial instument now, yesterday, last year, if ever.