Posted on 05/21/2010 8:13:04 PM PDT by steve0
Nuke the BP oil spill drill hole, it will seal it just as the Russians have done at 9 other sites. Too much money and environmental damage is at stake and we can no longer allow PC & environazis to prevent the correct action from being considered and taken. Obama promised to use science in determination of policy, yet they have taken the nuclear option off the table.
Most earth and soil nuke detonations had MUCH less. Heck the US set off several tests in Nevada, some of which were not as contained as they wanted. Most of the Midwest and some of the east got fall out from those.
Several like Bikini atoll test were done just above the atoll and were air bursts. France also did several Pacific tests, and Russia did a few in the Sakhalin islands, including IIRC, a 100 mega ton air burst. That used to be viewable online you-tube I believe, and probably still is.
To get a burst with particulate fall out you usually must get particulate matter into the air. The ones suggesting using a nuke probably are NOT thinking along the lines of our tests in Nevada/New Mexico etc... A fractional KT would barely put anything in the air. Minimal to no wave.
Aluminum foil hats NOT needed this weekend.
In Smokin’ Joe yer talkin’ to a 30 year roughneck. That trumps pencil neck nuclear geex.
I do not have objections to any of those programs.
I do have 30+ years in the oil patch as a Geologist, many of those years spent on wellsites, and a scattering of experience in the engineering end of the patch as well.
So I really don't care what you think of what I think of nukes, the oil industry is my area of specialization, and this is not a job for a nuke. The means in use have worked, without fail in getting wild wells under control. Nukes don't carry that same record, nor have the Russians had an exactly stellar environmental record of their own. Colleagues who have worked in Russia have related cases of what in the Gulf would be horror stories well beyond the present mess.
There is a very good chance that trying to nuke the well shut would only cause more problems, ones which are far harder to fix.
Oh silly, the leakage from Three Mile Island couldn’t hold a candle to what is emitted from the tiniest nuclear explosive device ever tested on the earth. People keep wanting to compare it to the Chernobyl disaster and it’s like comparing a lightning bug to lightning.
I’d rather nuke Washington and get the feds and media out of the way of the experts.
The nuke sounds like a nice theory, but the Rooskies never nuked anything quite like this. I’d want to see it tried in mile deep water in the middle of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans on oil wells whose underground geology mirrors this one, before goofing around with it in the Gulf.
WOW, what an amazingly complex question (that was old 20 years ago).
Now back to my questions for you:
How many years of experience do you have in the oil field, nuclear and geology industries?
Oh by the way, I've worked on particle accelerators, neutron detectors, gamma detectors, sonic and ultra sonic and electromagnetic exploration tools with their telemetry systems and computer controls.
Oh, nearly forgot, I've also worked on tools capable of delivering shape charge "Guns" into a well that measure pressure and temperature at the time of perforation.
You are incorrect about the amount most nuke tests put in the air. Silly wrong. Now since you are online, you can look all this up. You can even see the pictures and movies online.
Oh, and for extended wearing of the aluminum foil hat, put a cool,,, slightly wet rag on first as that will keep the heat down. Minimum further brain damage will occur.
Good night all. That silly thing is NONE of this will happen mainly because of our government and it’s base. They don’t even want drilling, let alone nukes!
Go to bed.
You are right but for the sake of extended release over US soil it was at least some example.
Oh, and did you see the special on Discovery a few years back about how much the Chernobyl area has recovered? Plants, animals, bacteria, etc. Are back like all over there.. some types that the Ruskies had killed off everywhere else in Russia are thriving.
The people who were directly exposed have not done so well... but then we would NOT be talking of that type of exposure here.
It will never happen here anyway, so this discussion is all for fun and intellectual stimulus.
Oh, and this well is spewing a combination of oil and gas.
The oil should be easier to seal up with an explosion than gas. Oil is move viscous and would flow much slower through the blasts overburden than gas.
seems to me, there’s room for more than one ‘straw’ in the opening of the well - so, why not keep adding more and more of those siphon pipes until the opening is filled with one big bundle of ‘straws’ leading up to the surface?
I guess it would be roughly the equivalent of lowering a paper clip into a shot glass from a third story window on a piece of sewing thread, using a couple of radio-controlled cars to help. Underwater currents will mess with the recovery string, much as puffs of wind would mess with the paper clip.
We initially heard numbers from 1000 to 5000 bbl/day, now they all are at the high end (better news copy, sells more soap). No one knows for certain, but a 2000 bbl/day recovery from the riser has to be making a difference. From there, the limitation is the ability to lift and process the fluid, separate the gas, and separate the oil from the water. Excessive 'suction' might collapse the riser pipe, leading to increased leakage where it would be harder to recover the oil. While a second ship might be able to take up some slack, bringing two ships close enough to try to tie in with another would not only tie up another drill ship, but risk yet another accident. Having multiple recovery strings (the oilpatch name for a long length of drill pipe 'joints' (a single, roughly 31 ft. section of drill pipe) all screwed together) would risk the recovery strings getting intertwined at depth, and inserting two different strings from separate sources would necessitate some very tricky maneuvering and coordination--and the release of more oil while that was taking place.
BP spudded the first relief well on the 4th of May, the second (backup) relief well on the 17th of May. The wells are projected to take 90 days from the spud date until they are complete, and target the original wellbore at 16000 ft. of depth.
While it takes longer, getting a drill bit in the close vicinity of the original wellbore is actually easier in some respects than the paperclip in a shotglass, but mechanical and other problems, running casing strings ('surface" and intermediate, Nippling up BOPs and such take a while, and it is pretty much guaranteed that BP and the drilling crews will be careful to not have a repeat of the incident they are seeking to remedy.
Were I BP, and expected to finish in 60 days instead of 90, I'd still say 90 days in case there was a problem in drilling the relief wells. If they said 60 days and it took 65, the press would eat them alive.
In the meantime, the riser recovery operation seems to be slowing the loss of oil to the environment.
Thanks for posting this explanation.
If I had to depend on MSM to learn anything about what is actually going on, and why, (and not & why not) with the mitigation efforts, I’d be ignorant the rest of 3 life times.
BTW, not sure if you’ve heard, but last week the town of Faith, SD (60 miles S of ND; 100 miles W of MT) was drilling a municpal deep water well, and struck oil instead, somewhere around 2,500-3,000’ down. A Denver exploration company is now contracted to do follow up.
I hacn’t heard that they had found oil in Faith. That’s pretty neat. They are well outside the Bakken/Three forks area in the Williston Basin. Hopefully, the area will get an economic boost from that.
Ok, I now respect your dissent. By your answers to my test you have shown that you are a rational person. Hats off to you.
You want to nuke the largest natural gas deposit in the world? It stretches from Texas to New York... You think it might ignite with a nuke? Maybe you have not studied the solution you are offering.
A tsunami requires the shifting of an active fault line. No such animal here.
Well we don’t want to “Centralia” the thing. I am talking about scientists considering a small shaped charge. Lets not have some of the thread ravers using a straw man of nuke that would blow a hole the size of NY. No one is seriously proposing a 100 megaton nuke.
No, that's a worse pollutant than the oil.
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