DoE Posts Raw Data From Oil Spill, Coast Guard Asks For Tech Help 138
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy this week opened an online portal where the public can get all the technical details it can stomach about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. The DoE site offers online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer and other problems in the ongoing mess. This comes alongside news that the US Coast Guard has issued a call for better specialized technology to help it respond to the ever-widening spill. The Coast Guard is looking for all manner of technology, such as advanced wireless sensors to help it track the movement and amount of oil in the Gulf, or devices that could help to contain and control the underwater leak."
Reader freddled points out a story at the Guardian that illustrates how the location of an oil leak is frequently the primary factor in its perceived importance.
Speaking of the BP gulf spill (Score:3, Funny)
Has anyone seen the new "Visit Florida" ads?
They discuss the fact that potential tourists are worried about the Gulf spill, and then say something like ...
"Florida has 835 miles of coastline. Northeast Florida has 221 miles of crystal clean beaches..."
In other words, "Come to Florida! Only 3/4 of our coast is covered in oil!!!"
Re:Speaking of the BP gulf spill (Score:5, Interesting)
"We've done a number of tarballs from Florida, Key West, Miami and so forth, none of which so far have matched the Deepwater Horizon," Gronlund said. "The tarballs that have been found on the beach in Florida are fuel oil."
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Just to clarify for folks with poor reading comprehension: this just applies to the tarballs washing up on Florida beaches, which happens at a low rate all the time. It doesn't apply to the giant plumes of emulsified oil deep in the Gulf, which could not have come from ships.
We'll be dealing with the consequences of the DWH spill for a long time, and most of them won't be visible on the beaches. We might never see the kind of obvious to the media disaster in FL that we've seen in LA.
Re:Speaking of the BP gulf spill (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not all coastline is beach environment, numbnuts.
Hey, a little courtesy please? I happen to have had a vasectomy earlier today and don't appreciate being lumped in with him.
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Oh don't worry, they won't be numb for very long...
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Only a 1/4 is oil free....at the moment. I thought I read or heard somewhere that they were worried about the oil slicks/spill getting caught in some water flow thing and coming around the coast of Florida and up the Eastern Sea Board, not to mention every other country and island near there. So it may only be a limited amount of time that the beaches are clean and able to be enjoyed before most of Florida and parts of the Eastern Sea Board are a complete mess, let alone all of the Gulf of Mexico areas. Tim
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A Reader? (Score:3, Funny)
How does a reader point something out when there's 1 comment on this article and it's not that "Reader"?
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Thank dog for the groaniad (Score:2)
They gotta be shitting me? So if it's near my house or where I'm going on holiday I'll think it's more serious than if it's in some kind of bongo-bongo land that I couldn't even point to on a map - and a map of bongo-bongo land to boot!
Awesome.
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Yes, statistically speaking. A big oil leak sucks. A big oil leak in your back yard, or at your vaction home, sucks WAY more to you than an oil leak in a place you will never, ever visit.
Note that an oil leak in the sahara, or the unpopulated southwest US, is far less of a big deal than an oil leak in, say, the Galapogos, or the center of New York. Different impact means different importance. Did you really give a shit about the oil leaks in the Iraqi desert, or were you mostly concerned that the soot wou
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Sorry to self reply, I caught myself mid-click:
By New York, I meant Manhattan. Clearly NOT the middle of New York. Not that the middle of New York wouldn't be bad, but I was trying to show how the inconveniencing of millions of people and a major financial center would be worse than an area which is exceptionally sparsely populated.
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Well there you go, the oil stains won't be so visible on them.
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The good thing about this is that it's less likely BP will be able to shirk their compensation committments or drag out the legal proceedings for eternity without massive public outrage like Exxon did.
Prince William Sound is apparently a beautiful, natural pristine area, but Exxon was lucky - it was not highly populated and not many people visited there so they could get away with dragging out the compensation lawsuits for decades.
The GOM is a whole different story.
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Well, some people claim that they care about Environmental Issues and that this (Gulf) oil spill is the epitome of man's destruction of all that is good in the world blah blah et cetera. The outrage when it's in Nigeria, though, is strikingly muted. This demonstrates, again, how it's really the freakishly skewed perceptions of people playing politics that drive "environmentalism" as it is currently practiced, and it doesn't have much of anything to do with the real environment.
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isn't this WAY outpacing the cumulative spilling in Nigeria (as in 2 years worth every month)?
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Well, the story isn't helping with things like:
the public can get all the technical details it can stomach about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf
I read that and think to myself, what if I read it all? Does that mean I'm an immoral person because I didn't stop reading and think this thing was the worst disaster in the world (making me ill)?
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You need to be more arrogant, taking moral cues from the people that write /. summaries is like trying to stop your eyes burning with a nice gasoline rinse, it just doesn't make any sense.
Re:Thank dog for the groaniad (Score:4, Insightful)
This demonstrates, again, how it's really the freakishly skewed perceptions of people playing politics that drive "environmentalism" as it is currently practiced, and it doesn't have much of anything to do with the real environment.
Actually, the people who are serious about environmentalism do care when it happens in Nigeria or other "off the radar" places. They actually expend a lot of energy trying to draw people's attention to these areas.
What you are seeing has nothing to do with environmentalism, but with the mass media, which naturally reports on things that are sensational, easy, and nearby.
My suspicion is that if this were a story about environmentalists trying to expose an environmental disaster in Nigeria, you'd be lambasting them for focusing on such a trivial issue that's not relevant to you.
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For those who didn't RTFA, they were talking in more global terms. They're talking about oil spills that ARE near someone's house, but in a country where those people have basically no recourse (Niger). The government is weak and/or corrupt and the oil companies just run as companies do -- maximize profit and only worry about the expense to others if the cost of a legal battle is high enough. In a country where there's effectively no chance of a legal battle in the first place, the rights of people livin
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The government is weak and/or corrupt and the oil companies just run as companies do -- maximize profit
It seems to me the way to maximize profit is to minimize losses due to spills. It would be in their best interests to prevent spills. One of the comments in the article pointed out a very interesting point. The English is horrible, which leads me to assume they are not a native speaker.
Is it actual worth pointing out the reality that in Nigerian illegal tapping into oil pipe lines , is a major issue that leads to leaks and sometime major explosion as the very photo used in this article shows. In addition pumping stations are attack which also leads to leaks. In short he claims to care about the leaks but fails to address how they are actual caused , while his total ignorance of the massive corruption in Nigerian , that scales into tens of billions and lies behind most of the problem seen. Merely means that this article is just about attacking the oil companies and doing nothing about the problem, for let?s be clear they only make money for oil they sell , they make nothing for that which is lost. Therefore, if they are really the evil corporations some would like to believe than will do what makes money.
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It seems to me the way to maximize profit is to minimize losses due to spills. It would be in their best interests to prevent spills.
Not quite. Again, preventing spills is important only insofar as it affects operations (delays the completion of a well and thus prevents the expensive rig from moving on to it's next job) or, in extreme cases, renders significant amount of product unrecoverable. Spilled oil, even a lot of it, does not present enough of a cost to warrant the expense of buying the hardware and implementing the procedures that would prevent those spills. Which is the whole point of TFA. The people of Niger are just fucked, ye
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Speaking of the oil spill... (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you know what the amount of pressure was from the leak when BP's 3 failsafe's failed? 20k+ psi. The NOAA has that info; at least they did yesterday.
Crude is extracted at +/-1,500 psi, so they were drilling deep enough to hit magma pockets (I forget the proper nomenclature for those types of pockets).
Only Russia has successfully drilled that deep...but they weren't dumb enough to try that kind of depth under the pressure and weight of the freakin' ocean.
20,000+ psi will destroy anything man can make to "plug" the leak. Is our only option nuking it?
If so, even if they do angle drill and drop a nuke, what if it cracks the strata further?
IMHO this will help to shuttle in that BS carbon tax. The longer the leak remains, the more damage, the more "reason" for the aforementioned tax. ...But, of course, this is conspiracy stuff. :)
Re:Speaking of the oil spill... (Score:5, Informative)
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True about valves being designed for 20 K psi being available.
However there are all the other aspects of the architecture of the systems down there that have to deal with 20 K psi. So many other bits of hardware have to be able to handle these pressures too.
Together they make for a very risky architecture because when something goes wrong we are at natures mercy.
Lets take an look at this another way. When we design an aeroplane we design in a Safety Factor. That means that everything is over designed to wha
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BTW pun intended.
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So... what? Because BP didn't want to lose oil, that means the disaster can't possibly be their fault? You're making some awfully generous assumptions. (And also, you're ignoring that oil companies routinely lose more oil each year than the Deepwater Horizon event is costing them.)
Legal definitions notwithstanding, corporations are not individuals. They do not have a unified will. They do not always act in their own bottom-line interest, because the interests of the decision-makers are not always align
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Its almost as if he is saying that the evil oil companies wanted to loose millions of barrels of their product into the open sea.
No, but the most certainly did intentionally gamble on that. The looked at the potential payoff, weighed that against the likelihood of a disastrous failure with the associated "expenses", and decided that it was worth it to throw the dice. They simply figured they'd make more money by cutting corners. Period. Evil or not never figured into the equation. It is the corporation's job to do just that, dispassionately decide what the most profitable course of action is, then execute it in an efficient manner. I
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Where to start...
Ok, when you say "we've been doing this for the better part of a cenury", define "doing this". Not all oil operations are equally risky, and I'd like to see a citation to back the claim that we've done deepwater drilling for the better part of a century.
Maybe more importantly, what do you mean "this has never happened before"? There have been many oil spills. Including from blown oil wells. Including in the Gulf of Mexico (1979). Here's a list of a few of them [infoplease.com]. If that's not enough, i
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I'm glad we agree that it's "obvious" you were lying when you said we'd been "doing this for the better part of a century". It's a shame you've decided to try to blame me for being the one to point out you were lying, and to deflect attention to the entirely irrelevant issue of why we're trying more difficult drilling operations.
You think there's never been a spill like this one? Guess that shows how effective media propaganda really is. Go educate yourself.
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20k PSI is doable with small areas for pressure build-up. But when you have large areas, you have a lot of pressure over that area which makes it difficult to contain.
For example, I've read that the well head is either 21" or 22" in diameter. That gives slightly less than 1400 sq inches to slightly over 1500 square inches for the area at the outlet of the pipe. At 20,000 psi that equates to 29 or 30 million pounds of pressure. There's no way to make a cap that can withstand that pressure. And even if y
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The pressure under the BOP is closer to 4500 psi (the reservoir is not at 20,000 psi, and the 18,000 foot column of oil contributes a decent pressure drop). The pressure above the BOP is probably less than 3,000 psi (according to figures released by the government, the data is linked from the DoE site).
So you are off by a factor of at least 20x there. Then, your arithmetic is faulty, a 21 inch pipe has a surface area of about 415 square inches, not 1500 (pipe sizes are diameters, it looks like you used the
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Especially since BP was able to pump mud down there with enough force to push the oil back into the ground. Of course, this top-kill didn't work but it still puts the lie to your contention that these pressures are unworkable for human technology.
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If so, even if they do angle drill and drop a nuke, what if it cracks the strata further?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_in_the_World [wikipedia.org]
Hollywood always seems to be a step ahead of current events . . .
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Onshore or offshore, wells have been drilled and are producing from reservoirs with pressures far greater than 20kpsi. Industry is moving towards wells with pressures greater than 35kpsi. I am not sure where the 1500 psi number comes from, but that is far below what even depleted wells are at. Maybe you mean the differential pressure fro
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A direct injection engine in your every day sedan can spray fuel at well over 20,000 psi. That pressure isn't some insurmountable force for which we have no recourse to handle.
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One thing we can do right now... (Score:2, Informative)
...is let the president know of our support for Clean Energy:
http://my.barackobama.com/CleanEnergy-auto [barackobama.com]
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I like how completely ambiguous this page is. It would be substantially more effective to vote in favor of a one child policy. At least that has a transparent metric for success.
Ethanol and traditional photo-voltaics are as dirty, if not dirtier than oil respectively because of inefficiency and heavy metals.
I am in support of clean energy if we are talking about building some gigantic nuclear power plants next to major population centers to decrease transmission inefficiencies.
Unfortunately, as the BO web
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I like the picture of all the eyesore windmills standing above the tree - because that's what it would take, everywhere, in order to adopt wind power as our primary generation method.
Re:One thing we can do right now... (Score:4, Informative)
I like the picture of all the eyesore windmills standing above the tree - because that's what it would take, everywhere, in order to adopt wind power as our primary generation method.
You say that like it's a bad thing. "Eyesore"? Come down here to the Gulf and have a look, pal.
Rubber duckies (Score:2, Insightful)
Rubber duckies with GPS tracking built-in. Wherever the oil is going, the ducks will go too.
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That shouldn't really be a problem. Your average highschool physics student would probably be up to the task.
The hard part I guess would be making the devices radiate their position efficiently from those depths.
More exposure of Africa is good (Score:2, Interesting)
Any chance to expose the pillaging of Africa is a good thing IMHO. Such a tragedy, does anyone care? Not many where I live. Now I know that not everyone can account for what happens on the other side of the world, but I mention the Niger Delta, the DRC, the current state of Somalia and their civil war, Sudan, Egypt's relationship with Israel, anything from Africa.. and watch the eyes glaze over. I usually just take it as a chance to tell someone, an opportunity. If we ever want to be a truly global communit
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JFC, how am I offtopic _this_ time? The summary posted an article about the Niger Delta.
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Spammers and keywords would be my guess.
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JFC, how am I offtopic _this_ time? The summary posted an article about the Niger Delta.
I think Slashdot did something goofy here if you posted in an article about the Niger Delta. Your comment is now under "DoE Posts Raw Data from Oil Spill".
This actually happened to me once... I made an offhand comment in someone's journal entry, and the journal entry ended up as a frontpage story on slashdot. I had a VERY early first post and looked like a bit of an ass in my comment :(
Crowdsourcing? (Score:1, Flamebait)
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This should have happened on about day 2, not on day 50 (or whatever we're up to now).
Unfortunately, we've had no leadership on this matter. Just a politician trying to act like a thug and put his foot to the throat of BP and kick someone's ass. As much as I like Obama, I think he missed a chance to shine on this one!
He could have organized a multi-faceted team to gather leaders from industry, government, and military, and had organized committees focused on a) stopping the leak, b) preventing it from hi
Oh man, that department.... (Score:2)
the glad-to-know-you-guys-are-on-top-of-things dept.
Are they on top of this like oil on water?
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Unfortunately yes.
Dumb question time (Score:2)
While they tried to block the flow of oil by shoving mud and other stuff down the tube, is there are a reason why they couldn't use some variant of expandable foam to seal the pipe?
By that I mean, shove a smaller diameter pipe down the main pipe, say to a depth of 500', then inject the expandable foam into the main pipe to seal it?
Yes, I am aware, as James Cameron remarked, one has to worry about the oil bursting out somewhere else, but is my above question even feasible?
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Expanding foam expands because the gas that is inside the foam is at higher pressure than the atmosphere, and is trying to escape. This equation changes greatly when instead of atmospheric pressure (~14 PSI) you are talking about 5,000 feet of water (2,165 PSI)
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The mud (mostly a bentonite clay slurry, with other minerals to add density) offered a means to *seal* the leak. The purpose is to fill the hole with a column heavy enough to cancel the pressure. It also lets you know if there is a leak somewhere down the tube if you lose too much of it. From what I heard, they found out that somewhere (I think 1000 ft down, but that's just from memory), they were losing a lot of mud.... it would only be an estimate from what they guess they were losing through the riser
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Some version of that is what some of the dome-with-pipes attempts were, but the pipe ended up being clogged up by slushy hydrate ice, among other problems.
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Some comments about the oil spill. (Score:2)
The drill depth was never attempted before by BP, and now from what I have heard from inside sources, the drill depth has produced pressures beyond the technical resources of _any_ of our science at the well head to contain it. All three safety measures failed at the well head.
These pressures were not expected and where a surprise and unfortunately the equipment cannot handle it.
So, it isn't that anyone is stupid, it simply cannot be stopped using any known engineering science.
Interestingly enough, our Rus
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Do not shoot the messenger.
Apparently what has been published by BP about the wells intents is not factual.
Like I said, this is from a person who was on site during the construction of the well.
I guess if it isn't that big of a deal and just an accident, the well should be capped in the next 30 days.
But if my source is right, this will last for the better portion of a year.
BP also has plans on publishing documents that say the well is capped, even if it is not in cooperation with Fox News, CNN and AP Newswi
Nuke it (Score:2)
kiloseven.blogspot.com recalls two successful self-sealing subterrene nukes detonated in Mississippi only 187 miles from Leak Zero, Now, if we could onlytest it on BP headquarters first...
Because it might not work (Score:4, Informative)
Because it isn't going through rock, it's going through mud. If you think it's hard to stop a gusher from a 2' diameter pipe, imagine how hard it would be to stop a 40,000 BBL/dy, methane propelled ooze from a 500 foot radius area with no containment.
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Because it isn't going through rock, it's going through mud. If you think it's hard to stop a gusher from a 2' diameter pipe, imagine how hard it would be to stop a 40,000 BBL/dy, methane propelled ooze from a 500 foot radius area with no containment.
You have a very valid point, But I think the idea is Why not stop on of the relief wells where they are and use a big explosive, Surely they're below the mud by now.
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Explosives will be the last resort... yes they "may" collapse the well... but they could also induce fracturing in the rock. You don't want a wide area uncontrolled and uncontrollable leak. As bad as things are, we have to remember that they could be worse. And as we have run out of cheap to extract oil, the risks of further exploitation are only getting worse.
The relief well is the method that offers the best chance of succeeding at plugging the leak, with the least amount of uncertain collateral damage
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If you use a nuke, some of the rock will be vaporized, some further down the shaft will be melted, then solidify. That would seal it.
Take a look at the photos from [wikipedia.org]
Oops - links to nuke articles, pics (Score:2)
more info [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
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The oil will still be pushing upwards before the rock cools...
Re:Why is nobody talking about blowing it up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Pick one:
The RUSSIANS did that sort of thing. The RUSSIANS. RUSSIANS.
There's a one-in-a-billion chance it could make things SLIGHTLY WORSE by making the oil come up at SEVERAL spots in the area instead of the one shitstream we hope to maybe have under better control in a few months.
If we blew it up, we couldn't reuse that well.
Re:Why is nobody talking about blowing it up? (Score:4, Insightful)
The RUSSIANS did that sort of thing. The RUSSIANS. RUSSIANS.
Yes the Russian successfully performed the procedure on land. This is underwater at 5000 feet.
As for the explosives, I offer you this car analogy:
After the mechanic ruptured my gas tank while performing a routine checkup, he blurted out the excuse "there's a lot of pavement out there so don't worry about it" and offered to install a nitrous system instead. Do I really want that nitrous system?
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You do remember that the flaming oil fields in Iraq were successfully put out by explosives, right? Detonating an explosive near the well could potentially close the breach without introducing it to catching fire or exploding. Given the properties of underwater/underground explosives, you could also drill a hole nearby and drop some explosives in there to seal off a long stretch of the well.
At least, in my head that makes sense.
WTF?? (Score:1, Informative)
"You do remember that the flaming oil fields in Iraq were successfully put out by explosives, right?"
Talk about a non sequitur. Explosives were used in Iraq to terminate combustion. Is that what we're dealing with in the Gulf?
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Yes, I assumed the GP was talking about putting Nitrous (a highly explosive solution) in their car to alleviate the leaking fuel issue...
Sorry if that wasn't portrayed properly.
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Yeah, we covered that.
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Right, but is there fallacy in drilling secondary holes nearby and "pushing" the well shut with secondary explosives?
What I was thinking was 2-3 holes nearby equidistant from each other and set off at the same time. Wouldn't that push enough mass to seal the well or cause enough rubble and opposite pressure to close it of?
I could be wrong and it could all go downhill from there.
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I'm not talking about putting out a fire here. I'm talking about collapsing the already drilled well.
With all the responses (that apparently don't read each other) berating me for stating that explosives can/have been used I apparently should have left that part out.
YES! I KNOW that the explosives were used to put out the fire and not actually close the wells.
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Perhaps if he put his car analogy in terms of another car analogy it would make more sense.
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Yeah, it's because we don't want to admit the Russians have ever done anything right. Or because we want to re-use the well.
It's not because it's an utterly retarded idea to use in this situation, and people keep bringing it up because they have a completely inaccurate idea of what the ocean bed is like. Nope.
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I don't think reusing the well is an option. The relief wells will kill it without possibility of reuse. At least that's the plan. As for explosions, they my have unexpected side effects that could conceivably make things worse. When the russians resorted to the nukes, it was because alternatives had be exhausted. Also, you should be wondering if it was so successful, why have they not attempted it again since the early 80s? Was there some undisclosed event that could make it undesirable?
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The relief wells will kill it without possibility of reuse.
Exactly, making that part of the whole "why they aren't using explosives" conspiracy rather retarded.
At least that's the plan. As for explosions, they my have unexpected side effects that could conceivably make things worse.
Seriously. You know people watch too many action movies when they think every engineering challenge can be solved with a big enough explosion, and more difficult problems simply require bigger explosions. Nukes are the biggest
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Really, you'll guarantee that? You're an expert in ... something? Nuclear weapons? Petrochemical Geology? Anything?
I just love the armchair generals this sort of thing brings out. Sometimes things are hard to do. Very hard. Maybe impossible.
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The RUSSIANS did that sort of thing. The RUSSIANS. RUSSIANS.
I'd like to bring up that a physicist is heading up the government's working group on the spill. If the approach has technical merit, I'm sure that Dr. Chu will be able to evaluate it. You know, based on the physics of the problem, rather than repeating the word "Russians" a couple of times.
Forget Bruce Willis (Score:4, Informative)
Let's call Chuck Norris, he'll roundhouse-kick the oil back into its hole.
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This is not "-1, Offtopic". It is "+5, sadly true". Please remoderate.